Explore AI Themes Across The Five-Layer Stack

Tech Stocks Outpaced Tech Jobs

In May 2026, tech stocks vs the S&P 500 continued rising – up 247% since January 2006. Meanwhile, tech payroll share continued falling – down 22%.

Neoclouds Ride The AI Wave

In Q1 2026, CoreWeave revenue hit $2.08B, Nebius $399M, and IREN (AI Cloud Services) $33.64M. All three grew revenue at triple-digit rates year-over-year.

China Leads AI Patents

Since 2017, China has led the US in AI patents granted by first filing country. In 2019, before incomplete data begins, China led the US 27,018 to 13,804.

DeepSeek Tops AI Tiger Compute

Among AI Tigers, DeepSeek's V4-Pro leads documented open-weight training compute at 9.7e24 FLOP. Alibaba's Qwen2.5 Instruct follows at 7.9e24 FLOP.

ChatGPT Leads AI Apps In MAUs

In April 2026, OpenAI's ChatGPT app had 482.94 million monthly active users. It led AI apps in MAUs – social apps (shown for context) still set the scale.

Claude MAUs Trail ChatGPT

In April 2026, Anthropic's Claude app had 11.31 million monthly active users. OpenAI's ChatGPT led AI apps in MAUs – social apps provide scale context.

Hyperscalers RPE Ranked

Based on the last-twelve-months revenue, the five hyperscalers generated $787,000 per employee on average. Meta led at $2.76M per employee.

Z.ai Revenue Mix

Z.ai hit ¥724.33M in revenue in 2025 – up 132% YoY. Open Platform & API was the fastest-growing segment hitting ¥190.38M in revenue – up 293% YoY.

MiniMax Alibaba Cloud Spend

MiniMax spent $75.88M on Alibaba Cloud in 2025 – up 7x from 2024. Its cap under the Alibaba Cloud Services agreement rises to $135M in 2028.

Premium AI Still Gets Used

American models in OpenRouter's top ten averaged $9.20 per million output tokens. Despite their premium, five of the most-used models were American.

Price Shapes AI Token Usage

Chinese models in OpenRouter's top ten averaged $1.34 per million output tokens. American models averaged $9.20 – nearly seven times more.