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Anthropic invests $50B in US AI infrastructure
- KaiserPro 10mo ago$170k per buisness customer. That's not including existing debt and opex. Good luck paying that back, especially as AI is basically commodity now.
- DANmode 10mo agoOver a decade? Also, > customers that each represent over $100,000 in run-rate revenue—has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year. isn’t unconvincing.
- olivermuty 10mo agoNone of this infra is worth anything more than five years from now.
- EMM_386 10mo agoHow do you think computing companies work? They buy hardware, replace it as the years go on, and continue doing business. The investment isn't just in raw compute - they have to build buildings, pay staff, and other things. For the hardware and software - they just keep pace as all the other computing companies have to.
- KaiserPro 10mo agoLets put that quote in its full context, because its designed to sound much more impressive than it actually is. > Anthropic serves more than 300,000 business customers, and our number of large accounts—customers that each represent over $100,000 in run-rate revenue—has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year. Let me deconstruct that: > Anthropic serves more than 300,000 business customers Hard fact. No qualification on spend or activity, are they on trails or fully paid with contracts and minimum spend > and our number of large accounts—customers that each represent over $100,000 in run-rate revenue run-rate revenue is an extrapolation. (https://www.fool.com/terms/r/run-rate/ https://www.fool.com/terms/r/run-rate/) That could be buisnesses that trail anthropic for a month, spend 24K and think "fuck thats expensive" and stops spending. average that over 2 months, then times by 12, boom 100k account. > has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year. no starting base.... Its unconvincing, because its smoke and mirrors. Give me the numbers of paying customers, over time with revenue. Then show the opex/capex.
- DANmode 10mo agoHow impulse-buy has business AI licensing got? Is it really a surprise later, the cost?
- KaiserPro 10mo agoLess impulse, more "oh we expected that we'd get more return". We have a project at the moment thats all based around sharepoint. They have ingested many tens of thousands of documents, and are expecting that MS copilot studio will be able to a) RAG and B) produce meaningful answers with a 4 line prompt.
- DANmode 10mo agoDoes it take more than a quarter or two to figure that out?
- KaiserPro 10mo agoThats my point right? you get monthly billing, look at the curve and go "oops thats not good" And then cut spending. The point is, run-rate revenue, which is extrapolated rather than _actual_ can easily mask this change, depending on how its calculated.
- DANmode 10mo agoI’m following - run-rate is definitely the buried lede here. Thanks!
- eitally 10mo agoHave you seen their 2025 growth curve (and projections)? https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1lwdwd6/anthropic_was_at_1b_in_annualized_revenue_at_the/ https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1lwdwd6/anth...
- justapassenger 10mo agoAre you saying that in next 10 years they'll make more money that there's an atoms in the universe?
- KaiserPro 10mo agohave you seen their cost curves and projections as well?
- sunir 10mo agoGrowth curves mean nothing if you're selling $0.90 dollars. You have to show a growth curve when price > cost. It's not even clear that value > cost. I absolutely love Anthropic; but I am worried about the fiscal wall they will hit that will ratchet up my opex as they will need to steeply raise prices.
- simonw 10mo agoSo the critical question here really is whether they are selling API access to their models for less than the unit cost it takes to serve them.
- tootie 10mo agoAlso, 800 permanent employees is $62.5M/employee.
- datadrivenangel 10mo agoWith the 2400 temporary employees it's $14M/job, which is very very capital intensive. If trends continue, all investment in the economy will be directed by about 6 people at a big AI company, and what will money mean at that point?
- catigula 10mo ago>The project will create approximately 800 permanent jobs For $50 billion? I think there's a serious problem here.
- AnimalMuppet 10mo agoAI spending is more on hardware than on jobs. That shouldn't be too great a surprise. $62 million per job does seem a bit more hardware-heavy than reasonable, though...
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> For $50 billion? It’s Capex. Most home construction produces less than a single permanent job on average.
- catigula 10mo agoProbably not the best idea rhetorically to pick something people literally require to live and compare it against AI spending to make your point.
- JumpCrisscross 10mo ago> Probably not the best idea rhetorically to pick something people literally require to live and compare it against AI spending to make your point Dams. Power plants. This isn't a difficult set to extend.
- cowpig 10mo ago> Today, we are announcing a $50 billion investment in American computing infrastructure > The project will create approximately 800 permanent jobs Approximately $62.5 million per permanent job created!
- keeganpoppen 10mo agobut it’s private money? who gives a fuck about the $/job created? if anything, it’s a good thing that Anthropic can afford to do it because they can so efficiently use capital. at least, so far…
- port11 10mo agoI think GP is criticising how ‘wasteful’ that is compared to better uses of the money in $/employee. It's really not creating that many jobs for the amount of cash we're talking about.
- klysm 10mo agoAn interesting thought is how much of this money ultimately lands in Taiwan and China
- robotnikman 10mo agoWe still need to fix the problem with powering these Datacenters....
- theultdev 10mo agothe administration is allowing datacenters to be utilities and build their own power plants, nuclear or otherwise. the excess can be sold to the grid. it's really the only way forward. seems like a win/win.
- testing22321 10mo agoEven better, don’t just “allow”, but force them to create power plants equal in size to their usage. Must be renewable.
- theultdev 10mo agoI don't care what they use. Nuclear preferred but whatever works for the area. Natural gas is the main reason our emissions have gone down as it replaces coal. Also I don't think forcing is necessary. These datacenters want to, why impose more regulations.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- testing22321 10mo agoYour grandchildren will care if they use coal or natural gas. Aim higher. Do better.
- theultdev 10mo agoYes they will, they will prefer natural gas of those two. The main reason of emission reductions as we transition off of coal. I really hope we go all in on nuclear though, with some natural gas and get rid of the windmills. Solar, hydro, geothermal can stay where it makes sense. Unfortunately our skies and land are littered with windmills made out of unrecyclable polymers that are terrible for raptors. Queue someone quoting how many cats kill birds like competing with the top predator is a good thing, or ignoring the fact that we put these in raptors' wind streams and cats don't hunt those large birds (which are usually endangered) Our kids deserve nuclear.
- agluszak 10mo agoNow let's wait until US invests 50B in Anthropic!
- ares623 10mo agoLook at that! where did this money come from?
- HardCodedBias 10mo agoThis is clearly aggressive. Will this pan out? We don't know, no one knows. But this isn't "a scam" there is a plausible future where a large percentage of white collar (or dare I say it, blue collar) work will have an assistant and that assistant requires a considerable subscription (200/mo? 1000/mo?). Interesting to see all of the leading labs in the West make this bet.
- diamond559 10mo ago12k a year out of your paycheck for an advanced Clippy "assistant"? Sorry, this is not plausible. Oh and by blue collar work do you mean done by walking talking robots? I bet you think we'll be flying cars to work w/in 5 years too huh. Oh yeah and when is your chatbot going to solve physics and cure cancer again? You ppl have lost your minds.
- miohtama 10mo agoIf it can format images in Microsoft Word without breaking the document, or fix Microsoft Excel formula issues everyone will be buying.
- HardCodedBias 10mo agoI don't think it requires robots. Although that's possible too. I think that HoloLens has a reasonable demonstration of how to assist blue collar work about 10 years ago (AFAIK it flopped). I would bet a dollar that similar technology augmented with LLMs could be useful to blue collar work.
- diamond559 10mo agoWell clearly Microsoft don't see how given that they canceled the project this year. Do you really think we need some video game HUD in our vision at all times? Come back to the real world it's nice here.
- HardCodedBias 10mo ago"12k a year out of your paycheck for an advanced Clippy "assistant"? Sorry, this is not plausible" It's certainly possible. Will it actually happen? IDK.
- Eufrat 10mo agoAre there any more details on this investment? Do they have the hardware or even the power to ready support such growth?
- 1970-01-01 10mo agoThe writing is on the (tomshardware.com) wall. Don't invest in AI. Invest in power, HDDs, GPUs, HVAC equipment, etc. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896707 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896707
- throwaway81348 10mo agowhat are relevant stocks or indexes?
- nateb2022 10mo agoASML ($ASML), Western Digital ($WDC), etc.
- bdangubic 10mo agonot sure I'd want to invest something that is on backorder for 2 years :)
- lispisok 10mo agoAnthropic doesnt have $50B to invest, even over multiple years, so who is really writing the checks?
- zamalek 10mo agoWe will soon read that US is investing 50b into AI infrastructure by means of Anthropic commitments. Both balance sheets line up, no money exchanges hands. NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, and OpenAI are all already engaging in this type of behavior.
- mgh2 10mo agoInstitutional debt: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896555 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896555
- veunes 10mo agoSeveral parties are writing the checks. It's a complex structure of future VC rounds, debt financing, and most importantly, massive cloud credit commitments from their investors like Amazon and Google
- Yizahi 10mo agoAnthropic just borrowed 133 billion dollars from different investors in September, and 20 billion in total over 2025. Just where would they get such amount of actual money? Ask Softbank for a donation? Those guys do like to pour money into a fire pit.
- mkl 10mo ago> Anthropic just borrowed 133 billion dollars from different investors in September 13 billion, not 133, and it was VC investment, not a loan: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropics-valuation-more-than-doubles-183-billion-after-13-billion-fundraise-2025-09-02/ https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropics-valuation-more-t... Anthropic didn't give a time frame for that $50 billion spend, but it's probably more realistic than OpenAI's $1.4 trillion spending plan.
- xnx 10mo ago"invests" "$50B"
- bfrog 10mo ago50B worth of meme generating power
- veunes 10mo ago"$50 billion investment" is classic "press release capital," not actual cash in a bank account. Anthropic isn't sitting on a mountain of cash. This is most likely a multi-year "commitment," funded by future investment rounds, debt financing, and possibly large pre-payments for cloud capacity from their investors, and it's a signal to competitors and the government about their ambitions, not a real $50B expenditure happening today