| How does future demand translate to spend? Anthropic aren't building out the data centres themselves, they're renting/leasing/borrowing from companies that are doing the actual spend on building out infrastructure. And the data centre companies aren't spending their own money, they're borrowing too (hence Apollo investing in data centres). Anthropic are paying SpaceX ~$1.25bn/month right now for access to more compute, that's $15bn a year, more than what these supposed margins would require in total spend (based on current revenue estimates). https://www.anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex The SpaceX deal is a great example of Anthropic creating demand, i.e: > We’ve agreed to a partnership with SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity. This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API. They committed to spending $15bn per year with SpaceX and then increased limits for customers on fixed cost plans, creating more demand without any increase in revenue. So, sure, it's not necessarily that they are raising money because they are unprofitable, but no alternate explanation makes any sense. The argument that could maybe made in favor is based on announcements like this one: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-invests-50-billion-... > Today, we are announcing a $50 billion investment in American computing infrastructure, building data centers with Fluidstack in Texas and New York, with more sites to come. These facilities are custom built for Anthropic with a focus on maximizing efficiency for our workloads, enabling continued research and development at the frontier. You might conclude from that, Anthropic are financing Fluidstack's build out, but they're not. https://x.com/fluidstack/status/2079250004510728559 Just after that announcement, Fluidstack raised $830 million to build out data centres, none of the money coming from Anthropic. Fluidstack are currently rumored to be raising another $1bn. Anthropic's "$50 billion investment in American computing infrastructure" is just committed spend on renting compute from Fluidstack, a commitment that Fluidstack then use to raise money to actually deliver it. If Anthropic making money hand over fist, they wouldn't need to raise for committed spend. And thus we return to the original question, how does future demand translate to spend? Actual handing over of dollars? |