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Comment by etempleton | Hacker News Reader

The whole AI world really is completely circular spending where every one loses money along the way. The only one really making any money is Nvidia.

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The most honest memory cartel is reporting stupid profit numbers too!

>Samsung chip profit jumps almost 50-fold; supply shortage to worsen in 2027

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/sustainable-finance-r...

>South Korean April exports rise 48.0% y/y as chip boom extends

https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-april...

To the point where the big memory makers are suddenly trillion AI-dollar companies.

There is a lot of money coming in from industry, actually an exponentially increasing amount of money - money that would otherwise go to employees is now going to AI companies. There are more startups than you can shake a stick at that are basically creating virtual workers for xyz task and selling them to companies. All that money is funneling back to AI companies. It's a gold rush and employee salaries are the gold.

How is SpaceX not making money?

Total investment is 20-40B, rent to Anthropic for 45B over 3 years.

Anthropic is also profitable now.

Anthropic is not profitable and does not expect to be revenue even until 2028. They are just losing less billions per year than everyone else.

As always, free cash flow and unit economics are more interesting than net profit.

By which metrics Anthropic is making a lot of money.

how exactly can you assume they have unit profitability

Plenty of analysis on this point, the inputs are not secret. Check out Semianalysis for example.

They have something like 70% margin on inference.

so speculation from a semiconductor website. that's incredibly likely to be wrong

We will see once Anthropic releases their S-1 too this summer.

I think you should do a bit of research and come back once you have fixed your knowledge gaps.

what research? it's private and there is large incentive to lie until ipo

They had 40% margin on inference in 2025.

https://archive.is/aKFYZ

You can quibble about the exact numbers, but I think it’s fairly clear at this point that inference is profitable with decent margins. Like you say, unit economics are more interesting than the profitability of the company as a whole.

Except that they're loaning a bunch of money to their "customers" to "buy" their products. It's still really circular.

This thing is going to explode. From this I have to imagine OpenAIs numbers are also going to be much worse than people imagine / what has been shared.

Hot take: the US government should invest money into AI. This is why this is happening. China is doing it.

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