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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

#51
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.

Please, some of us are long NVIDIA...let us cope in peace. :-)

Here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud or they are too dumb to realize. AI is intelligence, and intelligence has almost never been the binding constraint on productivity.

So you will get no productivity increase from the AI bubble. Yes, you read that correctly.

The test is simple, if raw brainpower were the bottleneck, you could 10x any company by hiring 200 PhDs. In practice you get 200 brilliant people writing unread memos, refactoring things that worked, and forming a committee to rename the committee. Smart has always been cheaper and more abundant than the discourse pretends.

Every real productivity revolution came from somewhere else like energy (steam, electricity), capital stock (machines that do the physical work), or coordination (railroads, shipping containers, the assembly line, the internet).

None of these raised the average IQ of the workforce, they changed what a given worker could move, reach, or coordinate with. Solow old line basically still holds. The output per worker grows when you give the worker better tools and infrastructure, not better neurons.

Meanwhile the actual bottlenecks in a modern firm are regulatory approval, legacy systems, procurement cycles, customer adoption, internal politics, and physical supply chains that don't care how clever your email was. A smart brains intern at every desk produces more artifacts, not more throughput, and in a lot of organizations, more artifacts is actively negative ROI.

Jevons does not save you either, cheaper cognition mostly means more slide decks, not more GDP.

So the setup is that models are commoditizing on one side, and on the other side a product whose core value add (more intelligence, faster) is aimed at a constraint that was never really binding. This of course a rough combo for a trillion dollar capex supercycle.

Fun for the trade, while it lasts, but there is no thesis. Just dont tell CNBC and short NVDA on time ,-)

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

#52
post #47
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

revenue is not profit

in no world is 30B ARR a bad thing

If they're spending 60B anually then that is bad. Obviously none of us know what their real burn rate is, but revenue is an irrelevant number if you don't have the full picture.

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

#53

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…

If you’re sure it’s going to go gangbusters you want to get it all in-house asap.

If you’re not sure it’s going to blow the socks off, foisting capital investment on partners is a great deal.

See the difference in companies/franchises that always own the land/building and those that always lease.

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

#54
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "fully caught up" mean in the context of an ever evolving technology? I think I'm in support of open weight models (though there are safety implications), but these things aren't cheap to train and run. This fact alone gives no incentive for leading labs to release cutting edge open weight models. Why spend the money then give the product for free? Now if "fully caught up" means today's level of intelligenc…

Yeah I don't understand it, it's a marathon with three companies perpetually a minute ahead, and people keep saying "I expect the stragglers to catch up". The only thing I can see them meaning is what you said, "in a minute the stragglers will be where the leaders were a minute ago", which, yeah, sure.

It makes perfect sense if you think things cannot improve indefinitely

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

#55
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

The sources are the sources. The reality is the reality.

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

#56

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 imagine it comes down to if they want to buy hardware every generation, that gets very expensive and depreciates quickly. You've then got a whole load of assets on your books that are technically obsolete for the bleeding edge. This way, AWS buys and maintains the hardware and OpenAI doesn't need to claim it as depreciation ?

Just a guess.

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

#57
post #3

> At the heart of this deal is Amazon’s custom chips: Graviton (a low-power CPU) and Trainium (an Nvidia competitor and AI accelerator chip). The Anthropic deal ... Yeah, totally not desperately seeking investment to keep the party going ...

It does seem like the tempo and volume of the music is getting louder and louder as the number of chairs is subtly decreasing, doesn’t it?

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

#58
post #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 expen…

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

Not if their pricing comes with multiyear commitments for reserved pricing. No doubt they get a huge volume discount but the advertised AWS reserved pricing is already enough for pay for a whole 8x HX00 pod plus the NVIDIA enterprise license plus the staff to manage it after only a one year commitment. On-demand pricing is significantly more expensive so they’re going to be boxed in by errors in capacity planning anyway (as has been happening the last few months).

The economics here are absurd unless you’re involved in a giant circular investment scheme to pump up valuations.

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

#59

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…

It’s fake news predicated on China not being able to get GPUs. But it turns out everyone was getting them their GPUs by serial number swaps in warehouse.

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

#60
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "fully caught up" mean in the context of an ever evolving technology? I think I'm in support of open weight models (though there are safety implications), but these things aren't cheap to train and run. This fact alone gives no incentive for leading labs to release cutting edge open weight models. Why spend the money then give the product for free? Now if "fully caught up" means today's level of intelligenc…

Yeah I don't understand it, it's a marathon with three companies perpetually a minute ahead, and people keep saying "I expect the stragglers to catch up". The only thing I can see them meaning is what you said, "in a minute the stragglers will be where the leaders were a minute ago", which, yeah, sure.

It's not a marathon, or any race. There is no a finish line. It doesn't matter that much that someone is a minute ahead.
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