Friday May 29, 2026
What a Machine Shop Taught Me About Token Pricing
In the first half of my career I ran machinery factories, and there was one rule that never bent. You did not quote a job until you knew what the material cost, what the labor would run, what the machine time would consume. Price without cost was not pricing. It was guessing. And guessing put companies out of business.
I keep thinking about this as I watch the AI industry attempt to develop revenue models, because eventually the bill comes due, and the AI labs that cannot tell you what a token costs are going to find out the hard way.
Every frontier lab is selling tokens at prices that bear no clear relationship to what those tokens actually cost to produce. The inputs are still in motion. Power contracts are getting renegotiated. Chip generations turn over before the last one is depreciated. Training runs that cost hundreds of millions get amortized against revenue projections that no one would underwrite in any other industry. Inference costs depend on routing, caching, model selection, and a stack of optimizations that change weekly. Ask a lab what a single token costs them to serve, fully loaded, and you will get a range, not a number.
This is not a criticism. It is an observation about where we are in the cycle. The AI industry is pricing the way a job shop prices when the customer is on the phone and the estimator has not finished quoting the order. You give a price, you take the work, and you figure out the margin later. Sometimes you make it up on volume. Sometimes you do not.
The interesting question for investors is what happens when the inputs settle. When power is contracted, when chip cycles stabilize, when model architectures stop turning over every six months, the industry will finally be able to cost a token the way a machinist costs a part. That is when pricing discipline arrives, and that is when the gap between the labs that actually know their unit economics and the ones that have been guessing becomes very visible.
Right now, everyone is giving prices. Eventually someone is going to read the job ticket and find out what it really costs. I want to invest in the businesses that already know.
◾ Blue Origin New Glenn rocket explodes on pad during static fire test (Spaceflight Now)
◾ Bitcoin falls to $73K (CoinMarketCap)
◾ SEC approves Paxos as clearing agency (Paxos)
Government & NGO Actions
◾ France market regulator warns unlicensed crypto firms face prosecution after June 30 deadline (Reuters)
◾ Bank of Italy confirms working with AI providers ahead of new model releases (Reuters)
◾ Japan says OpenAI gave some banks access to new GPT-5.5 model to help prevent cyberattacks (Reuters)
◾ CFTC sues Rhode Island over prediction market jurisdiction (CNBC)
◾ Argentina proposes anti-gambling-addiction bill requiring crypto and payment providers to block unauthorized betting platforms (Argentina Gov)
Financial Notices & Public Company Releases
◾ Financial updates:
Viasat $VSAT Q4’26: Revenue $1.2B +2% y/y | Op loss $0.6M | Net income $58.8M | aEBITDA $369.9M -1% y/y (SEC Filing)
CD Projekt $OTGLY Q1’26: Revenue zł191.1M +6% y/y | Op income zł97.1M +3% y/y | Net income zł106.2M -5% y/y (CD Projekt)
BitFuFu $FUFU Q1'26: Revenue $72.7M -7% y/y | Op loss $37.9M | Net loss $35.0M | aEBITDA loss $34.4M (Globe Newswire)
Bitcoin Treasury $BTCFF Q1’26: Revenue C$27.7K | Net loss C$19.3M (Newsfile)
◾ SpaceX targets at least $1.8T valuation in IPO (Bloomberg)
◾ Grayscale delays IPO, cites market conditions (CoinDesk)
◾ FalconX confidentially files for IPO (CoinDesk)
◾ Sequans $SQNS drops digital asset treasury strategy, selling bitcoin to redeem July 2025 debt (Sequans)
◾ VanEck launches first US spot BNB ETP $VBNB (VanEck)
◾ Sidus Space $SIDU prices $100M Class A stock offering (PR Newswire)
◾ Karman Space & Defense $KRMN launches secondary offering of 13.5M existing shares (Business Wire)
◾ Firefly Aerospace $FLY launches 12M share public offering (Firefly)
◾ Hyperscale Data $GPUS terminates ATM sales agreement (PR Newswire)
◾ Brag House $TBH announces 1-for-8 reverse stock split (Globe Newswire)
Restructuring, Hacks, Losses & Legal Updates
◾ Kalshi sues Minnesota over prediction market ban (FOX 9)
◾ Virgin Galactic $SPCE settles derivative lawsuits for $2.75M (StreetInsider)
◾ CNN sues Perplexity over copyright infringement (CNN)
Crypto Protocols, Applications & Business News
◾ Samsung to acquire 4% Dunamu stake for $408M (Cointelegraph)
AI Models, Applications & Developments
◾ Anthropic releases Claude Opus 4.8 (Anthropic)
◾ DigitalBridge $DBRG to acquire ArcLight Capital for $1.05B (DigitalBridge)
◾ Apollo $APO and Blackstone $BX working on $36B Anthropic debt financing (Bloomberg)
◾ Apple $AAPL expected to tout on-device AI over cloud at WWDC (The Information)
◾ Microsoft $MSFT to release new coding models (The Information)
◾ Amazon $AMZN to offer Grok models on AWS (Business Insider)
◾ Anthropic raises at $965B valuation, eclipsing OpenAI (Bloomberg)
The Attention Economy, Gaming & Interactive Shifts
◾ Oura unveils Ring 5, 40% smaller, with blood pressure detection (Business Wire)
◾ Gemini launches “command center” with Grok-generated personalized feeds on prediction markets platform (Gemini)
◾ Fertitta Entertainment to buy Caesars Entertainment for $17.6B (Reuters)
◾ Polymarket launching KYC in beta (X)
Space Systems, Satellites & Cosmic Activity
◾ American Airlines $AAL to install Starlink on 500 narrow-body planes (American Airlines)
◾ Amazon $AMZN to acquire Apple’s $AAPL 20% Globalstar $GSAT stake (PCMag)
◾ Firefly $FLY wins $75M contract to deliver drones to Moon’s south pole (Firefly)