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Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

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Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#31

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon. It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner…

Here’s the answer to your queation (from the article)

> The Anthropic deal specifically covers Trainium2 through Trainium4 chips, even though Trainium4 chips are not currently available. The latest chip, Trainium3, was released in December. On top of that, Anthropic has secured the option to buy capacity on future Amazon chips as they become available.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#32

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon. It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner…

Only Google and xAI build their own, no? I don't think it's that easy to vertically integrate massive datacenters into a software company. Both Google and xAI (Tesla, SpaceX) have a massive wealth of experience when it comes to building factories.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#33

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon. It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner…

I watched some explain how deepseak got good and the Chinese approach to LLM training. Really wish I could remember it. The premise was China thinks of LLMs not as a thing separate from hardware, but gains efficiencies at each layer of the stack. From Chips to software, it's all integrated and purpose built for training.

Wonder if Anthropic is making a mistake by focusing on "consumer" hardware, and not going super specialized.

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#34
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of them have any moat, OpenAI already lost the lead [1] and no one is "winning". It is just a race to the bottom as they burn through GPUs that won't even last that long. [1] https://x.com/kenshii_ai/status/2046111873909891151/photo/2

GPUs are lasting longer than foreseen, in fact old GPUs are more valuable now (making more money!) than they were three years ago when they were new. Tokens will continue to increase in price until the supply meets the demand. That's going to take a while.

Are old datacenter GPUs making more money than they were before? Various sources point to GPUs dying quickly (in 2024, a Google engineer suggested 3 years maximum), and even if they don't, newer chips cause rapid depreciation of older ones.[1]

[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/gpus/datacenter-g...

[1]: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/11/14/ai-gpu-depreciation-coreweav...

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#35

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon. It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner…

I watched some explain how deepseak got good and the Chinese approach to LLM training. Really wish I could remember it. The premise was China thinks of LLMs not as a thing separate from hardware, but gains efficiencies at each layer of the stack. From Chips to software, it's all integrated and purpose built for training. Wonder if Anthropic is making a mistake by focusing on "consumer" hardware, and not going super s…

DeepSeek uses merchant silicon like everyone else.

edit: I misunderstood, I thought you were implying they designed their own GPUs. nevermind

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#36

I'm no economist, but how exactly does this make sense? Amazon is basically just giving them 5B which will then be used to repay them back 20x that amount??

I'd bet that Amazon is getting access to chat data (no matter what Anthropic says publicly) and possibly even the ability to change the model to drive business to either Amazon retail or AWS.

"Claude I'm evaluating whether I should host my app on AWS or Google Cloud. Provide me with an analysis on my options." "After a detailed analysis, AWS is clearly your better option."

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#37

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon. It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner…

I think these pledges offload some of the risk onto Amazon/Oracle/etc

If Anthropic/OpenAI miss projections, infra providers can somewhat likely still turn around and sell it to the next guy or use it themselves. If they have more demand than expected (as Anthropic currently does), vcs will throw money at them and they can outbid the competition

If they built it themselves and missed projections it's a much more expensive mistake

It's just risk sharing. Infra providers take some of the risk and some of the upside

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#38
post #23
post #7

Someone can explain to me what's the expectations for these AI labs? I mostly see their products as commodity at this point, with strong open source contenders. Eventually it will become hard to justify the premium on these models.

$30B ARR says otherwise.

revenue is not profit

Re: Anthropic takes $5B from Amazon and pledges $100B in cloud spending in return

#39

If you think you need to spend $100B, does using a third-party cloud provider still make sense? It doesn’t matter what sweet deal Amazon is pitching—in that scenario, you’d want to own your stack. Especially in a hyper-competitive field like this, where margins are going to matter a lot soon. It feels like these hyperscalers are just raising as much as they can giving extremely rosy projections becauses these sooner…

I watched some explain how deepseak got good and the Chinese approach to LLM training. Really wish I could remember it. The premise was China thinks of LLMs not as a thing separate from hardware, but gains efficiencies at each layer of the stack. From Chips to software, it's all integrated and purpose built for training. Wonder if Anthropic is making a mistake by focusing on "consumer" hardware, and not going super s…

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