[reticulates]

Looks like it’s behind a paywall. I’ll take their word for it that semi analysis now estimate it to be 80%. That makes my point even stronger, if that number is true, where is the money? The report says that Anthropic generate over $50bn in revenue so at 80% margins that gives $40bn in profit. Where is that money? If they’re generating $40bn in profit, even after accounting for very high employee compensation and training costs… they should have tens of billions in profit, yet they’re out raising tens of billions instead. Where is the money going? And if only 20% is their actual inference costs, where are all these compute providers going to make their money? The world is at compute capacity on, what, $10bn in revenue?

[twoodfin]

If you figured out how to build a machine that turns electricity into gold with an 80% margin, of course you’d go out raising capital to build more machines.

[reticulates]

Your contention is they're spending it on what, exactly? Leaks put OpenAI's training spend at single-digit billions so that can't be the machines they're building, and they (OpenAI + Anthropic) are famously renting/leasing/borrowing compute through varying-degrees-of-circular deals... so what's the machines they're building?

[twoodfin]

Just as the article supposes: Getting their hands on as much compute as possible to address rapidly growing demand for inference.

[reticulates]

but your contention is they are profitable on inference. Why would they need to raise money to get their hands on compute if they're making money on compute? There's no upfront costs for Anthropic, Anthropic don't own or build compute infrastructure, they just rent access to compute owned by someone else, such as the $15bn/year SpaceX deal they signed recently (which they used to create more demand without increasing revenue).

https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex

[twoodfin]

The more capital Anthropic has, the more compute they can put their hands on and sell at a massive markup for Claude inference.

Limiting themselves to the profits from the compute they already have when capital markets are dying to give them cash at favorable terms would be foolish.

[reticulates]

You’re missing the point. Anthropic are bringing more compute online by renting it and then they are creating the demand for it by increasing the limits on fixed cost plans. Anthropic are increasing their spend on compute without increasing revenues. I’m not guessing that, it is part of their announcements!

https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex

“First, we’re doubling Claude Code’s five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and seat-based Enterprise plans.

Second, we’re removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max accounts.“

Every one of these plans is a fixed cost. Anthropic doubled their limits without changing the price. Even if inference is wildly profitable and these plans aren’t subsidized, they’ve just cut the profitability in half.

And the non-plan usage that is being paid for directly is paid for monthly. If they can sell $1 of compute as $10 of inference then they have $9 the next month to spend on more compute. Of course the capital markets would want to give them money if that were true but they would have no reason to take it.

Why would a net 30 business need to borrow hundreds of billions over many years? Anthropic currently spends an estimated $5bn/month on compute so at most they need to float $5bn, but if they’re making 90% margins on compute, that $5bn would be paid for… within a couple of days. Where is the hundreds of billions of dollars?