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How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

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Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#21

Post by Analemma_ »

daft_pink wrote: post #3

I think this is a minor speed bump and VC’s believe that cost of inference will decrease over time and this is a gold rush to grab market share while cost of inference declines. I don’t think they got it right and the market share and usage grew faster than inference dropped, but inference costs will clearly drop and these companies will eventually be very profitable. Reality is that startups like this assume moore’s…

My own usage and the usage of pretty much everyone I know says that as inference costs drop, usage goes up in lockstep, and I’m still nowhere near the ceiling of how many tokens I could use if they were free.

I think if these companies are gambling their future on COGS going down, that’s a gamble they’re going to lose.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#22

Post by ctoth »

x0x0 wrote: post #18
daft_pink wrote: post #3

I think this is a minor speed bump and VC’s believe that cost of inference will decrease over time and this is a gold rush to grab market share while cost of inference declines. I don’t think they got it right and the market share and usage grew faster than inference dropped, but inference costs will clearly drop and these companies will eventually be very profitable. Reality is that startups like this assume moore’s…

> inference costs will clearly drop They haven't though. On two fronts: 1, the soa models have been pretty constantly priced, and everyone wants the soa models. Likely the only way costs drop is the models get so good that people are like hey, I'm fine with a less useful answer (which is still good enough) and that seems, right now, like a bad bet. and 2 - we use a lot more tokens now. No more pasting Q&A into a site…

You're describing increased spending while calling it increased cost. These aren't the same thing. A task that cost me $5 to accomplish with GPT-4 last year might cost $1 with Sonnet today, even though I'm now spending $100/month total on AI instead of $20 because I'm doing 100x more tasks. The cost per task dropped 80%. My spending went up 5x. Both statements are true.

Here's an analogy you may understand:

https://crespo.business/posts/cost-of-inference/

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#23

Post by noir_lord »

lesuorac wrote: post #20
candiddevmike wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GenAI financing is a flat circle. The bubble bursting is going to have a huge blast radius.

They survived the dot-com bubble, I don't see the AI bubble taking out Amazon. It might take out your 401k for a decade.

I'm on like my fifth once in a generation financial crisis.

At a certain point you just expect it.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#24

Post by LetsGetTechnicl »

Kuinox wrote: post #14
floatrock wrote: post #4

The buried lede: Anthropic: "$2.66 billion on compute on an estimated $2.55 billion in revenue" Cursor: "bills more than doubled from $6.2 million in May 2025 to $12.6 million in June 2025" Clickthrough if you want the analysis and caveats

I could find an ARR for Cursor of $500M. Why do they they in this article that Cursor is loosing with this spending number ?

Ed's mentioned ARR in previous articles and it's not a "generally accepted accounting principle". They cherry pick the highest monthly revenue number and multiply that by 12, but that's not their actual annual revenue.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#25

Post by JCM9 »

“Spend” requires a grain of salt here. AWS “invests” in Anthropic and then Anthropic buys AWS. If you follow the money with marked bills, AWS is buying this compute from itself and then claiming revenue.

There’s a lot of that sort of thing going on at the moment in the AI bubble.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#26

Post by dcre »

LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #24
Kuinox wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I could find an ARR for Cursor of $500M. Why do they they in this article that Cursor is loosing with this spending number ?

Ed's mentioned ARR in previous articles and it's not a "generally accepted accounting principle". They cherry pick the highest monthly revenue number and multiply that by 12, but that's not their actual annual revenue.

"Cherry pick the highest" is misleading. If your revenue is growing 10% a month for a year straight and is not seasonal, picking any other than the most recent month to annualize would make no sense.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#27

Post by tinyhouse »

haberdasher wrote: post #11
rdtsc wrote: post #9

> through September, Anthropic has spent more than 100% of its estimated revenue (based on reporting in the last year) on Amazon Web Services, spending $2.66 billion on compute on an estimated $2.55 billion in revenue. Well I don't have to scratch my head any longer and wonder why Amazon hasn't jumped on the AI bandwagon with their own Gemini or whatever. They are sitting pretty and selling shovels and pickaxes to th…

Amazon owns 15-19% of Anthropic. So yes and no.

No way their share is so high. Where did you get these numbers from?

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#28

Post by dcre »

Kuinox wrote: post #14
floatrock wrote: post #4

The buried lede: Anthropic: "$2.66 billion on compute on an estimated $2.55 billion in revenue" Cursor: "bills more than doubled from $6.2 million in May 2025 to $12.6 million in June 2025" Clickthrough if you want the analysis and caveats

I could find an ARR for Cursor of $500M. Why do they they in this article that Cursor is loosing with this spending number ?

The article Zitron links says Cursor has single-digit millions of cash burn with about $1B in the bank (as of August). Assuming that is true, they are losing money but have a long runway.

https://www.newcomer.co/p/cursors-popularity-has-come-at-a

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#29

Post by dzonga »

One day we will westerners will learn why the Chinese are releasing models that are optimized for cost of training n yet good enough to run locally or cheaply.

when the music stops, suddenly a lot of people won't just sit on the ground but plunge into the depths of hell.

Re: How much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services

#30

Post by rs186 »

rdtsc wrote: post #9

> through September, Anthropic has spent more than 100% of its estimated revenue (based on reporting in the last year) on Amazon Web Services, spending $2.66 billion on compute on an estimated $2.55 billion in revenue. Well I don't have to scratch my head any longer and wonder why Amazon hasn't jumped on the AI bandwagon with their own Gemini or whatever. They are sitting pretty and selling shovels and pickaxes to th…

Amazon trained their own models like Nova and has AI coding assistants like Amazon Q, but I don't know anyone outside Amazon who is using them.
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