a16z finds very few companies track and disclose AI impact over time

a16z’s second State of Markets report says the AI story is getting louder in markets, but not much more measurable inside most companies. Nearly 30% of S&P 500 firms now report some “quantifiable impact” from AI. Only about 2% say they track any metric over time.

That gap matters because the hardware side is moving like the future is already here. Demand for compute is still outrunning supply, and the report says even older GPUs like Nvidia’s A100 are holding up better than skeptics expected. Rental rates are not sliding the way bear cases assumed. In some cases, they’re still at or above where they started the year.

The report frames this as a broader shift from software to hardware, from bits to atoms. AI buildout is pulling in semiconductors, power, networking and other capital-heavy parts of the economy. And it’s being financed not just by hyperscaler cash flow, but increasingly by debt too.

At the same time, adoption is still shallow. On the consumer side, as of April, barely about 2% of US households were paying for an AI service. The report says usage is broad but immature, which is a neat way of saying the industry’s valuation fever is running ahead of the paperwork.

There’s also a softer correction happening in software. The report says the post-ZIRP market now has more profitable companies and fewer fast growers, so the old growth-at-any-cost trade is gone. AI hasn’t killed software. It’s just made everyone explain themselves a lot more carefully.