Some of these numbers are crazy. The scale of them is hard to comprehend.
- $42 billion net loss in 2025
- $518 billion in infrastructure obligations coming up (EDIT)
- 1/4 of revenue coming from 2 customers
- $42 billion net loss in 2025
- $518 billion in infrastructure obligations coming up (EDIT)
- 1/4 of revenue coming from 2 customers
Google, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, Meta, SpaceX, and tons of other startups are spending trillions on data centers, but everyone is renting them out. They aren't renting them to each other (and paying the extra overhead when they have their own servers).
That leaves basically just OpenAI and Anthropic on the hook to pay for everything BEFORE the GPU half of it depreciates away, but they are busy cutting prices to compete with Chinese models which runs counter to their need to increase prices to fulfill their obligations.
"The near-$42 billion net loss included a roughly $34 billion accounting charge that reflected an increase in the estimated value of financing that could eventually turn into Anthropic shares, rather than money the company spent running its business."
As a member of the working class who believes this money is coming from systemic exploitation of the working classes, I hate it that Anthrhopic can just loose $8 billion like that. Those $8 billion could have been used elsewhere, including to mitigate the effects of the climate disaster, to educate the youth, towards social security, or to increase the wages of the working people who could have used it to pay rent, or go to the cinema, or a family trip to visit their grandma who lives in Wyoming.
8 billion is enough to give each of them $160. Great, all of Anthropic’s spending is enough to give each family a trip to Texas Roadhouse including dessert.
Have you ever been in poverty? I grew up that way and the then-equivalent of $230 would have meant not skipping Christmas when I was 6. It would have meant a full refrigerator, gas for the car for a couple of months, or so many other things.
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872426...
That spending obligation sounds extremely unlikely to be fulfilled without a bailout. Anthropic's IPO is them passing the hot potato forward.
Many of these obligations are with the big clouds who don’t have capacity to serve them anyways. Google has said they have hundreds of billions in purchase obligations they can’t fill because they don’t have enough TPUs and data centers. Google gets a bigger marketing and investor headline, and there’s a queue behind Anthropic if they bail, so of course everyone would sign the commitments knowing the risks.
I’m sure AWS and Azure are on the same page.
In the worst case, many of their biggest customers have tons of GPUs (Meta, AWS), so they could always license out their raw models at steep discount to help absolve themselves of the obligations.
Finally, in the worst case scenario, even with margin compression, they pre-purchased most of the compute so there’s not enough for the open models to run on. If Opus was the same price as Kimi/GLM, I doubt many people would pick the open models.
Keeping financiers of their IPO from understanding what they might be buying seems to swerve into fraud territory. Keeping their investors from knowing/understanding what the problems are also seems fraudulent.
I mean, sure, you think that and I know that many others do too.
It's Anthropic and OpenAI mainly competing for who gets used by the US government and possibly any US business that does any contracting work, while many others get banned. So basically, Fortune 500+.
There is also a non-zero possibility that the US Gov nationalizes the entire industry and then starts directly throwing Trillions USD into it in the name of "national security". Low % chance, but I can see it happening. Or at least the Fed Gov taking a controlling ownership stake.
It's also possible that the US Federal Government forces NVidia to outright prevent open models via: https://venturebeat.com/infrastructure/nvidias-openshell-con...
Revenue growth means nothing if you don't have a viable business plan. Anthropic doesn't have one, except "this thing is more important than Big Bang". I don't discount the possibility that they stay afloat on borrowed money long enough to actually find a way to be profitable / rule the world. But it's nothing other than appeal to consequence right now.