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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

#51

Post by mossTechnician »

dcre wrote: post #26
LetsGetTechnicl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If a company's revenue in January is $100 and it grows by 10% every month, the December revenue is $285. The year's revenue would be about $2,138, but ARR in December would be $3,423. That's 1.6x the actual revenue.

ARR could be a useful tool to help predict future revenue, but why not simply report on actual revenue and suggest it might increase in the next year? I have found the most articles to be unclear to the reader about what ARR actually represents.

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

#52

Post by thewebguyd »

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 don't think anyone is expecting Amazon (or Google or Microsoft for that matter) to be taken out by the AI bubble.

I would expect to see OpenAI, Anthropic, and a lot of the little tool wrappers to get taken out though, or at least acquired for pennies on the dollar when it bursts.

But like the last one, it's going to be us, the tax payers, that are left holding the bag.

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

#53

Post by AznHisoka »

ai-x wrote: post #32

Just a reminder, Ed Zitron is neither an AI researcher, nor an Engineer, nor a Financial Analyst, nor an Economist nor an Insider and has ZERO clue in multiple dimensions (technology, investing, unit economics, growth, TAM) to analyze any of this

>> nor a Financial Analyst, nor an Economist

Those people arent exactly experts or right most of the time either

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

#54

Post by adolph »

noir_lord wrote: post #23
lesuorac wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

. . . once in a [news media financial analyst] generation financial crisis.

Its like fruit fly generations, not 20-30 year human cohort generations.

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

#55

Post by username223 »

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…

Color me skeptical. We're running into the speed of light when it comes to transistor size, and the parallelism that made neural nets take off is running into power demands. Where do the exponential hardware gains come from? Optimizing the software by 2x or 4x happens only once. Then there's the other side: if Moore's Law works too well, local models will be good enough for most tasks, and these companies won't be able to do the SaaS thing.

It seems to me like models' capability scales logarithmically with size and wattage, making them the rare piece of software that can counteract Moore's Law. That doesn't seem like a way to make a trillion dollars.

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

#56

Post by grogenaut »

noir_lord wrote: post #23
lesuorac wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you were 100 then you'd be right on pace. Or slightly ahead. Apparently a generation is 25-30 years. I think they should update that

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

#57

Post by xeornet »

almostgotcaught wrote: post #41
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.

this is the latest mantra from people who have missed the boat. i'm like lol do you think that industry didn't learn anything (about financing structures) from the last one?

I guess by this logic we should never have a depression/recession/bubble burst ever again? We always learn from our mistakes!

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

#58

Post by ai-x »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #37
ai-x wrote: post #32

Just a reminder, Ed Zitron is neither an AI researcher, nor an Engineer, nor a Financial Analyst, nor an Economist nor an Insider and has ZERO clue in multiple dimensions (technology, investing, unit economics, growth, TAM) to analyze any of this

Correct. And yet, he's provided some of the most level headed takes on the current LLM boom, to the point where FT Alphaville link to his analysis of the economics.

The jury is still out there if his analysis are level-headed or not. He says things that *some* people want to hear, but that's not level-headed

E.g

What is the unit cost of serving a Token? It is the cost of electricity + amortized cost of GPU (GPUs would have been Capex, but because of their fast depreciation rate, you can claim they should be Opex). Given this cost structure, every SOTA labs (Google, Anthropic and OpenAI) are profitable and actually have high-margins 50-60%.

With this margin and growth, the frontier labs can be profitable anytime they want to. But they are sacrificing profitability for growth (as they should be)

Where is Ed's analysis about this? Either he is disingenuous or clueless. Remember people who voluntarily subscribe to Ed, are coming from wanting to hear what they believe.

If he is level-headed, show me an Ed article that is positive about AI

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

#59

Post by dexwiz »

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…

Point 2 was the analysis I saw. Context size and token cost grow inversely at a rate that keeps prices constant, almost like supply and demand curves.

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

#60

Post by omnicognate »

spydum wrote: post #49
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

specific clarification: That was only Cursor's AWS bill. If they are using other providers, wasn't clear.

TFA claims Cursor "obtains the majority of its compute from Anthropic — with AWS contributing a relatively small amount" and therefore only claims that for Cursor the AWS number indicates a "direction of travel" for compute costs. (Debatable whether it does indicate even that, ofc.)
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