The Decoder reports that a16z calls the current AI market a "textbook Jevons paradox": data from Ornn, Silicon Data and Bloomberg (as of August 2026) shows token prices keep falling while H100 GPU rental prices hold steady or even climb. Cheaper tokens unlock agents, automation and new applications, so volume grows faster than per-unit costs fall, though the article notes it is unclear how much demand comes from humans versus agentic systems burning tokens at a staggering rate, and that compute demand could be artificially inflated. The whole chain rests on one assumption — AI usage grows fast enough to offset falling token prices; if demand flattens, chip makers, memory suppliers, energy providers and cloud companies take a hit, and US stocks already dropped on reports that OpenAI's annualized revenue might be lower than previously reported.