> "...with more than four-fifths of that growth coming from the emerging world."

If anyone thinks this is a part of the global TAM that's got $1000 a month to blow, well then I've got a stable of flying unicorns to sell you.

To simplify break that 1B up into 3 levels of purchasing:

1) High-tier (US, Western EU, ANZ, Japan, South Korea, Singapore, UAE, etc) - 200-250M knowledge workers.

2) Mid-tier (Eastern EU, Latin America, urban China, India tech sector, etc) - 300-400M

3) Low-tier (Rest of the world) - 300-400M

Low-tier users are mostly free tier or heavily subsidized pricing.

Mid-tier are going to account for USD sub-$100 tiers. Probably averaging less than $50/seat.

High-tier are who you are assuming is the 1B. Users are not equal in that knowledge worker count, so there aren't 1B knowledge workers to charge money.

And when you consider Low-tier users a majority of those are free users which need to be subsidized by the High-tier users. So either free tiers get much more restrictive or the providers lose additional training data. A bulk of Low-tier users cost money and provide little to no revenue.

Edit: And think about Mid-tier and Low-tier for 5 seconds. Why would they pay Anthropic or OAI when they get get 100x+ inference from DeepSeek or Xiaomi? Mid-tier may be the only area that is willing to spend money on a US provider, but I would wager significantly on the fact that users in the Low-tier almost universally do not care.