Anthropic reveals $900B AI spending commitments ahead of IPO

fraywing

Anyone have a non paywall link?

ex1fm3ta

ohh boy, guess who's gonna pay for all of this ? Retail investors of course. VCs want to get out quickly hence the crazy valuation, institutionnal investors are already heavily positionned on this through energy, semiconductors and cloud actors ..

altcognito

How much to power those data centers? It's kind of meaningless if you can't power them.

ChrisArchitect

Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50337439

NickNaraghi

Pretty insane that sama's $7T target in 2024 wasn't that far off... https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-do...

simonw

The commitments are over 19 years, but they expect to spend half of that, $447.5bn, by the end of 2030 - so about $105bn per year for the first few years. Their 2026 revenue looks like it will be ~$67bn so clearly they're anticipating continued significant revenue growth for this to make sense.

Aurornis

> The filing directly discloses for the first time that Anthropic has agreed $895.4bn in purchase commitments and lease agreements for computing power and infrastructure, of which $447.5bn is expected to be incurred before the end of 2030. So $448 billion committed, with unclear cancellation terms, through the next ~48 months. Clearly this will be rising over time, but even a naive division results in $10bn per month of compute spending. That honestly doesn't seem so bad relative to some of the claims I've seen? Their Q3 revenue is about $5.6bn per month and it's rising. They have so much money in the bank waiting to be deployed that they get a billion dollars of interest per year. Investors are desperate to put more money into the company. They spend a lot on compute, but rolling it up into cumulative spend numbers makes it sound scarier.

digitaltrees

$900b contract spending / $30b = 30 years of revenue. That’s wild. They have committed to absolutely insane growth with no margin for error.

sunir

I'd also like to reveal a Chapter 11 restructuring of Anthropic in 2029 to cancel these contracts. I mean, I can't reveal that because I'm just some schmuck. But I'd like to.

cmiles8

If they slowdown just a bit more (and growth just slowed) they’re bankrupt. If they grow like no startup in history they just eek by and manage to barely pay their bills. Impressive, but not worth anything close to $1T plus valuation. If they achieve AGI money becomes worthless. So where’s the upside for investors here?

etempleton

Zero percent chance they can grow fast enough to meet their financial obligations without taking on some extremely expensive debt that will increase and compound their losses. At this point I think the goal is: Step 1: Go public Step 2: Allow exit for early investors Step 3: file bankruptcy Step 4: Amazon or Google “rescues” the company at pennies to the dollar on the already heavily diluted valuation.

honeybadger1

They will have to be bailed out. If they go public, leaders will take their money and run and everyone else will be buying up their parts.

7e

If’s fine. They’re the smartest guys in the room.

lofaszvanitt

The safest bet here is to put your money into datacenter infrastructure indexes :D