Annual revenue at four AI-coding startups jumped from $800 million to $6 billion

Software developers have become the clearest success story of the artificial intelligence boom — but whether other industries can catch up may determine if trillions of dollars in AI infrastructure spending ever pay off, The Economist writes in Will anybody use AI as much as coders do? article.

The way software engineers work has already been transformed: many now dictate instructions to AI coding agents rather than typing code themselves. The scale of adoption is striking — roughly four out of five developers report using an AI coding tool.

The financial numbers back this up. Combined annual recurring revenue at four AI-coding startups — Cognition, Cursor, Lovable and Replit — jumped from about $800 million in June 2025 to $6 billion today. Research firm SemiAnalysis estimates that coding now generates more than half of the combined revenue of Anthropic and OpenAI.

The stakes for the broader industry are enormous. The Economist calculates that to justify the current pace of data-centre construction, annual global revenue from AI use would need to reach $2.5 trillion by 2030 — up from roughly $150 billion today.