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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

#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 law will drop the cost over time and arrange their business around where they expect costs to be and not where costs currently are.

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

#6

Ed Zitron's style isn't for everybody, I understand that. But if these numbers, and the direction they're going in, are correct... to me this points to a significant AI bubble deflation coming soon. It just isn't sustainable, it seems.

if you are worried about AWS spend, i have news for you about non AWS spend.

"coming soon" is also really over simplistic. you would have missed some of the greatest tech companies in the past 20 years if you evaluated startups based on their early-year revenue vs infra spend

like sure i have a dog in this fight but i actually want the criticism to sharpen my thinking, unfortunately yours does not meet that bar.

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

#7

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…

> 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.

It could also be that you give too much credit to the market. People follow trends because in most cases that makes money. There is no other deeper though involved. Look at the financial crisis, totally irrational.

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

#8

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

For context, AWS's total revenue for 2024 was $107.6B: https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details...

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

#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 the AI fools. Not a bad strategy for them...

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

#10

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 and these companies will eventually be very profitable.

Inference costs for old models will drop, but inference costs may stay the same if models continue to improve.

No guarantee that any wrapper for inference will be able to hold on to customers when they stop selling $1.00 for $0.50.

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