Hacker News Reader

Comment by brokencode | Hacker News Reader

They made $11.5B just in Q2 2026, which is $46B annualized, or 10x their 2025 revenue of $4.6B.

That's a lot already and growing quickly.

Their profit on that was reportedly $559 million. But, this is after you realize that Anthropic got a discount on May/June from their new agreement with xAI's Colossus data center. So their first profit positive quarter happened during the time when their costs were artificially lower than they will be going forward.

Lots of people seem to love to do the simplest extrapolation that benefits their point. It's the same with "AI is improving at rate X, therefore if we linearly extrapolate, we'll hit AGI in a year."

You can’t just “annualise” your best day. That’s not how it works.

Everyone is cutting back their AI spend because of the ridiculous cost, and a price war is emerging between AI companies.

Check costslice.com - it may help you cut some ai bill.

Oh spare me the pedantry. What else are you going to compare? The year-on-year for Q2? That’s certainly going to have a much higher multiplier.

Your guess is as good as mine on whether these companies will continue growing, stall, or decline. Don’t try to pretend your methodology is more sound though.

I could start a business with a similar growth trajectory. We can mail people $100 bills for a low low payment of $10. I just need $500 billion dollars of startup capital and I can show you a 10x yoy growth for a few years.

I'm in. I would like to predicate the entire US economy on your business model.

Except Anthropic had an operating profit in Q2, and your scheme never would.

You're just parroting a headline. They did not actually make a profit in Q2 when you take all of their expenses into account.

You’re just parroting another headline. Adjusted operating profitability is still a milestone.

Tech companies are capital intensive. AI ones especially. Not a surprise that they don’t have GAAP profitability after 5 years.

If they, through standard accounting practices, cannot show they are profitable how do we know they are profitable? I assume they can't just say "we are profitable assuming you ignore the costs we paid to build up XYZ". I'm guessing they could pre - rent compute for 10 years or something and maybe that's all on the balance sheet but you'd just amortize that and I think that falls under GAAP?

That sounds fun but this is people paying for real products and services. The demand is there (and it's growing faster than any other commercial technology in history). They just need to work on inference (and potentially training) costs. I think that's clearly achieveable.

For the record, growth plays have been common in Silicon Valley for many decades. It's how we ended up with all the major tech companies we see today. Of course, it's high risk, high reward.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com