Things change fast in this space. Anthropic had a big boost from having the premier coding model for a while, but GPT-5.5 has closed that gap at a time when a lot of Anthropic customers are looking for cheaper alternatives.
Anthropic is coming off of a recent change to their enterprise billing that substantially changed the pricing for many users. They were smart to do the fundraising before the effects of that change could fully propagate.
GPT-5.5 is a bit more expensive than Opus ? Current list prices
| Model | Input | Output |
| GPT-5.5 | $5/MTok | $30/MTok |
| Opus 4.8/7 | $5/MTok | $25/MTok |
Considering that their models are de facto extremely close in performance you would think that these arguments would've held, but they clearly don't.
I don't like Altman and I am still upset about his memory deal last year but he prepared for the current shortages months before anybody else. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to lack any plans besides third party contracting. IMHO they got very lucky with xAI and Google having spare capacity and willing to rent it. But what about next year?
Everyone has critical risk on multiple parts of the supply chain. GPUs and Memory are just things OAI mitigated for.
Power - Bigger bottleneck than GPU or RAM perhaps, New Grid connected capacity is typically 10+ year timescale with lot of regulatory friction. Captive capacity is also quite constrained - now Gas turbines have 7+ year wait time.
There are plenty of hard constraints that OAI cannot easily solve either.
It is not clear that running one's own datacenter is a competitive advantage. Why do you think OpenAI can handle that?
I mean, this is a bit like complaining that McDonalds doesn't have their own herds of cows. OpenAI actually isn't in the business of buying GPUs or running data centres, and it's pretty weird to think that's an advantage (though it comes up constantly on here, as Anthropic keeps eating OpenAI's lunch).
There are many suppliers that are desperate to fight for Anthropics business, and it has shown an agility to embrace whatever advances in the industry come along. Anthropic is now running across a million or so Google TPUv8s, for instance. If tomorrow someone else comes out with a better GPU/TPU, they can embrace it in a heartbeat.
All while OpenAI sits on their rapidly depreciating GPUs.
Or...actually they won't, because OpenAI doesn't take business advice from HN. The vast majority of OpenAI's compute is from Microsoft, Oracle and so on. They're smart enough to not become a big hardware purchaser when that isn't their business. The core claim of your comment simply isn't true at all, nor is that the direction OpenAI is moving.
I see most of the surge here comes FOMO AI spending which will have to be dialed down later half of the year, otherwise those companies will have to layoff to fund their AI bill, which is harmful to their business.
Anthropic grabs its bag at the peak, but feast is over.
And many more that are 50% of what they were: Snowflake, Coinbase
And many more that went back to private companies and then were sold off: Carbon Black, etc...
I'm actually too lazy to go list out all of them.
But employees, beware, of those gnarly lockup periods post IPO where all the better classed options than yours get to exit.
this gives a nice comfy exit to many late-stage investors, etc.
and, of course, it's hard to say that it's great that these companies are mere shadows of themselves post-IPO, but also it's impossible to non-misleadingly assess each IPO as if they were in a vacuum.
obviously Coinbase is/was a stupid venture, but at the same time it was a pretty good bet at the time. and the same stands for a lot of these.
Lots of professional investors are passing on the SpaceX IPO for example, which is why they had to increase the share of the retail investors.
They are dumping them on your 401k -- especially SpaceX.
So IPO is not particularly a liquidity event for investors as much as a valuation/pricing event. Indeed, the tech IPO's that have done the worst were the ones where shareholders wanted liquidity.
Clearly none of the multi-trillion dollar companies could find a buyer now if they really needed to sell themselves, so they're not really "worth" that much. (Nor are their founders, who can't sell their shares without tanking the stock.)
So these stocks are more like derivatives: a way to bet on the future where betting volume is huge relative to the underlying asset.
index funds will be the cause of the next catastrophic collapse
We got "dumped" Google and Facebook, so... Those probably made up for all the other "dumps".
We also got "dumped" TSLA, which is meme-ing in the trillions at the moment.
You can short Anthropic at IPO if you want...
A trillion dollar valuation seemed so hard back in the day and now there are so many companies in that list. What's the next level?
Is this just signs that $ is no longer the inflating at the same rate over time and its the realistic inflation that is reflecting in the stock market?
Prices of all goods surely has to follow to make up for the revenue needed to sustain these valuations and also the salaries to sustain the prices.
Unfortunately, those who are not in the loop is not going to have a good time.
Situations change.
But you, of course, can buy on their IPO. They need every bagholder they can get :)
Companies that reached a level of maturity where going public make sense don't keep doing funding rounds to cover the rate at which they bleed money.
I moved all my money outside US index and global index funds because of SpaceX and OpenAI. At least until these IPOs have passed I will not move any money back. The sheer size of these IPOs might trigger a market crash.
A lot of the money that is deployed by VCs comes from pension funds and asset managers that ultimately manage money for the average Joe.
Having been through an IPO before, it was good for employee liquidity, but bad for the culture and long-term success of the company.
I also imagine that venture funding rounds have a lower ceiling than the public markets - but at these rounds I'm not so sure!
α β γ δ ε ζ η θ ι κ λ μ ν ξ ο π ρ σ τ υ φ χ ψ ω
They cannot raise forever, SpaceX has done more rounds but the timing is most important.
OK, so their self-reported run-rate revenue hit $47bn in early May.
For comparison:
Apr 6th 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-c... - "Demand from Claude customers has accelerated in 2026. Our run-rate revenue has now surpassed $30 billion—up from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025."
So that's $30bn at the start of April.
Feb 12th 2026: https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-30-billion-s... - "Today, our run-rate revenue is $14 billion, with this figure growing over 10x annually in each of those past three years."
That was $14bn on Feb 12th.
And $9bn in December (according to the above April 6th link.)
Hard to imagine what a world with 100GW of compute looks like.
[1] https://epochai.substack.com/p/frontier-labs-dont-use-most-a...
^^ This quotes 1.4GW at the end of 2025. Add 0.3GW at Colossus 1, and some initial fraction of 1GW Trainium2 from [2]
I think token counts and GW are a gross over simplification here. Not all tokens are the same in the amount of GPU time they consume or the size of the GPUs they require or the amount of energy they consume. There's a huge optimization potential here once these companies get serious about consolidating the business they have and executing much more efficiently. Given enough time, these companies can heavily optimize their operations. Short term growth and not slamming the brakes on that is their primary concern.
funny enough - those 2 might not meet. then what happens ?
Instead of ARR they should report actual revenue for once.
Run-rate is taking a recent measurement and multiplying it out so it will span a year. Basically, it assumes they keep all of their current contracts, and don't gain any new ones.
Forward-looking revenue is an estimate of what the integral will be from now to a year from now.
For a growing company, run rate is between past revenue and estimates of future revenue.
Forward-looking revenue estimates are often made up from whole cloth so are highly untrustworthy. But a run-rate is saying "we've already been making this much money, we just need to maintain where we are and that's how much we'll bring in". Backward-looking revenue for something like Anthropic is meaningless because almost all of their customer base is recently acquired - they're growing like crazy, not 20% per year.
So, it's saying something but without more details it's also vague and always partially forward looking. I prefer the TTM metric (Trailing Twelve Month revenue).
Along the lines of "in the 4.75 hours starting at 02:35 yesterday we collected invoices worth $X so our run-rate revenue is now $Y"?
it's
(revenue of this month) * 12
that means, of course, if you make $1000 in january, your RRR is $12000.
...even if you end up making $0 every other month and thus only $1000 total that year.
thats why RRR is perhaps harmful. especially when it's not growing. it can be much bigger than the actual revenue. in anthropics case it's rapidly climbing, though, so it underestimates revenue if that growth keeps up
So you're assuming lots of risk and putting it all in the same basket.
There's no shame in getting 100k $ worth of stock, selling it and putting it on some vanguard fund and diversifying, in fact it's statistically the best move you can do.
Of course, you can be like those many googlers that did this and then regret in hindsight.
I suspect we'll have our first $10T company in the next 2-3 years. That's only doubling.
Well, I will enjoy it while it lasts.
I did look into this briefly long ago for SpaceX. There are ways for relatively small investors (and I do mean relatively!) to get into some of these companies equity pre-exit by buying shares from employees who currently hold them for those who want to reduce risk/need the cash now vs. later.
You will likely need to have enough assets already with a single institution to have a private banking relationship with your bank. They would be the one to call to ask what options might be available. There are other options like EquityZen that make it more accessible, but I have not looked into those at all.
You will also need to be either an accredited investor or a qualified investor ($1M/$5M minimum networth not counting your personal property) depending on how each company is setup, but again I'm not entirely sure on details there.
I stopped looking into it when I was told that there was a $1M minimum buy-in at that time. More than I was looking to do at the time. I imagine it's much higher these days.
These are of course highly risk investments and I am unsure of how tested these structures are - so I imagine there is some counterparty risk on top of all the usual stuff.
And Saudi Aramco before they IPO'd
Investors are betting real money on a payout. It seems disingenuous to think that they’re all idiots.
Databricks raised an L round last year, so they'll have to solve it first.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/excel-specificati...
I feel AI is a bit different, as in there is a spectrum ranging from “utterly stupid” (early ChatGPT), “very helpful” (kinda now), “SkyNet 2.0” (what good are humans!).
As algorithms and technology improve, AI will be both cheaper and more capable. Companies like Anthrophic wouldn’t be the vaulted celebrities as they are today. At that point, I’m not sure what value much of society can provide…
At one time, blacksmiths had a valued place in general society. Today, not so much…
https://huggingface.co/Anthropic
models 0
None public yetHynix is participating with a new circular deal. Hynix is also valued at $1 trillion now, which is positively insane.
This scam will implode harder that the housing bubble.
They're the belle of the ball right now, everybody is talking about them, everybody wants to invest in them, so they can call the shots.
Then they'll have money in the bank for a long time no matter what happens – IPO, market downturn, etc.
Takes off lots of pressure so they can continue focusing on the product.
I do care about: how useful their products are vs. cost and how secure are their businesses. Actually I only care about the first thing since these services are hot swap-able with some effort.
Now, headlines are only about hundred of billions. I do not know what to think about that, apart from the fact that I wish that we were putting that money to enhance human lives in general. Of course, people will say that these tools will help humans in the future, but 1) at what costs, and 2) I would prefer, I don't know, bridges or infrastructure, or free healthcare, or food for everyone.
Until they IPO and the investors make their money, who knows what is behind the revenue stated
/s