“The progression of laser brilliance has been compared to Moore’s law for the number of transistors on a chip…

From these trends, it looks like lasers will become roughly 100 times cheaper per watt by 2045. If you believe this timeline is too aggressive, then add 5, 10, 15 years to the estimate and you’ll find the conclusions of the rest of the post will remain the same. Regardless, it means 1 MW of raw infrared diode laser output will have a price on the order of $10,000, while visible wavelength lasers would be several tens of thousands of dollars.”

From ToughSF.