Apollo reports top 10% of AI customers account for nearly all spending

The AI boom has a customer concentration problem that makes even traditional software look diversified. According to a new analysis from Apollo Global Management’s Chief Economist Torsten Slok, the top 10% of AI customers are responsible for 99.5% of model-serving spend and 99% of neocloud spend. The numbers behind the imbalance Slok’s analysis, published on September 24, draws on data from Ramp’s spend-management platform, which tracks corporate purchasing behavior across thousands of businesses. On the adoption side, roughly 10% of software-spending businesses on Ramp now engage a GPU vendor, up from under 4% just two years ago. Model-serving and inference participation jumped from 2.4% to 8.7% of firms over the same period. Neocloud utilization climbed from 2.0% to 3.3%. The title of Slok’s report captures the paradox neatly: “AI Adoption Is Spreading. AI Spending Is Concentrating.” For context, consider how this compares to other enterprise software categories. Non-AI SaaS solutions show the top 10% of firms accounting for 91.8% of expenditure. CRM software is even more distributed, with the top decile responsible for 84.2% of spend. At 99.5%, AI model-serving spend isn’t just ...