Deutsche Bank says AI costs are falling 13x a year, faster than any transformative technology before it

AI is getting cheaper at a pace no transformative technology has matched. That is the central finding of a Deutsche Bank report published on October 14, 2026. According to the bank, the cost of reaching a specific level of AI performance has fallen by nearly 47% every quarter since 2023. Compounded over a year, that works out to a 13-fold reduction. The numbers behind the deflation Deutsche Bank benchmarked AI’s cost curve against other technologies that reshaped the economy. By the bank’s math, AI’s deflation is running about four times faster than the decline in DNA sequencing costs. It is roughly six times faster than gains in general compute. Against lithium-ion batteries, the gap widens to 18 times. Separate analysis from Epoch AI, cited alongside the bank’s work, makes the point even more vividly. Epoch found a 725-fold drop in the cost of matching a given score on the GPQA Diamond benchmark. The comparison runs from early 2025 OpenAI models to later iterations. GPQA Diamond is a set of difficult, graduate-level science questions used to test AI reasoning. The trillion-dollar paradox Falling unit costs have not translated into falling total spend. Deutsche Bank projects that ...