After U.S. voters on Tuesday elected officials who are pushing to restrict data center expansion , some tech executives and investors are concerned that new delays in standing up computing capacity will make existing servers for AI more expensive to run.

And if computing becomes even pricier, there’s a question of whether declines in the cost of running AI could slow down.

So far this year, the cost of running AI has been falling, even as the price of renting servers has risen. For example, OpenAI’s GPT-6.1 Sol model, released in late September, can perform comparably to a bigger OpenAI flagship model, GPT-6 Astra, when used with a high reasoning setting. Yet the newer model costs about a fifth as much on a per-task basis as the older model, research firm Artificial Analysis said.

Anthropic has touted similar efficiencies with its latest models.…