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Comment by SeanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Isn't taking an impressive looking stake, in effect, leaving them holding the buck?

Now I’m no big city spreadsheet man but I bet you “company that owes us billions went belly up” looks better on the books than “company we bought that owes us billions went belly up.”

It’s pretty crazy that Amazon’s $8B investment didn’t even get them a board seat. It’s basically a lot of cloud credits though. I bet both Google and Amazon invested in Anthropic at least partially to stress test and harden their own AI / GPU offerings. They now have a good showcase.

Yeah. I bet there’s a win-win in the details where it gets to sound like a lot of investment for both parties to look good but really wasn’t actually much real risk.

Like if I offered you $8 billion in soft serve ice cream so long as you keep bringing birthday parties to my bowling alley. The moment the music stops and the parents want their children back, it’s not like I’m out $8 billion.

Echoes of Enron-style accounting "tricks"...

Why does everybody keep insisting on this “Enron accounting” stuff. LLM companies need shitloads of compute for specialized use case. Cloud vendor wants to become a big player in selling compute for that specialized use case, and has compute available.

Cloud provider gives credit to LLM provider in exchange for a part of the company.

These are really normal business deals.

Amazon gave away datacenter time share in exchange for stock in a startup. That has nothing to do with electricity futures and private credit revolvers.

They said echoes of the tricks.

I've read thousands of pages of Enron history, this has nothing to do with it.

This is my thought too. They de-risked any other AI startup from choosing AWS as their platform. If the hype continues AWS will get their 30% margin on something growing like rocket emoji, if they don't at least they didn't miss the boat.

No! Anthropic goes bankrupt or at least teeters and Amazon buys for pennies

this might be another possibility -- but why even bother to buy anthropic anyways, if not for the patents?

the talent will move out naturally -- amazon can just scoop up with its bucket (*not s3)

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