New Delhi, April 27 -- To understand why, look at OpenAI. Its success in domination of the consumer market for chatbots has become a poisoned chalice, because powering frontier models for roughly a billion active users requires enormous and expensive computing power.

About 75% of OpenAI's $2 billion monthly revenue comes from consumers, many of whom pay about $20 a month for ChatGPT. But those consumers could also be costing Sam Altman's company somewhere between $1 billion and $3 billion thanks to the rising price of running larger and more complex AI models. OpenAI expects to burn through $115 billion of cash by 2029.

Musk is facing similar costs for Grok. Its developer xAI, which Musk merged recently with SpaceX, hasn't disclosed the...