Token Bill Dwarfs CPU Bill | Ben Pouladian on Meta's Muse, Anthropic S1, and Why All Roads Still Lead to NVIDIA

Ben Pouladian of BEP Research returns to Monetary Matters to break down who's winning and losing in AI right now, starting with Meta's Muse, the consumer agent he calls the "McDonald's version" of AI, and why he thinks its revenue will come mostly from ads rather than subscriptions, especially across WhatsApp-first markets like India and Brazil. Ben explains why the token bill for agentic AI dwarfs the CPU bill, why the key metric is becoming cost per token per megawatt, and why he believes "all roads and rockets lead to NVIDIA." He makes the case against AMD, including his open letter to Lisa Su and the scaling challenges of the Helios rack, and argues that NVIDIA GPUs are the "Rodeo Drive" of digital real estate because they are fungible and financeable in a way custom ASICs are not. Jack pushes back with TrendForce data showing every part of the AI supply chain is tight except GPUs, and Ben responds that commodity bottlenecks like memory and hard drives get crushed once supply catches up, while the true bottleneck is powered, permitted land. They discuss the growing data center backlash and whether the base case should be 25 gigawatts rather than 43, Anthropic's S-1 and its roughly half-trillion-dollar compute commitments, and whether AI lab revenue can double again next year. The conversation closes with scaling laws, why models will segment like grades of gasoline, AI's move into biology and drug discovery, and stock ideas including Meta, Lam Research, and Lattice Semiconductor. Recorded September 29, 2026.

“Meta's Muse Rally Bought the Wrong Layer. We modeled a billion agent users. The investment case turns on activity, token costs and trust”: https://newsletter.bepresearch.com/p/metas-muse-rally-bought-the-wrong?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

Jack Farley on X https://x.com/JackFarley96

Ben Pouladian on X https://x.com/benitoz

BEP Research: https://www.bepresearch.com/

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