Say what you like about Sam Altman, but given how Anthropic is scrambling to sign capacity deals for compute we can sure say he was right about the capcity build out needed.
Scrambling? Seems to me xAI built too much capacity (for what they can use in 2026). Does that mean OpenAI built the right amount? I don't see how this proves that just because we see one AI company willing to sell compute. We don't even know the terms/pricing.
> Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said his company tried to plan for 10-fold growth. But revenue and usage increased 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis, which he says explains why it’s been so hard to keep up with demand.
> “That is the reason we have had difficulties with compute,” Amodei said Wednesday at his company’s developer conference in San Francisco. Amodei added that the company is “working as quickly as possible to provide more” capacity and will “pass that compute on to you as soon as we can.
I think "scrambling" is a fair characterization of the CEO saying "we have had difficulties with compute" and "working as quickly as possible to provide more"
They've also signed new compute deals with Google and AWS recently.
Or the bubble he was pumping hasn't popped yet. We won't be able to say how much of this capacity was actually "needed" until 10 years in the future, if ever.
People are getting real stuff done with the internet. But there were also a whole lot of overhyped companies that rightly crashed back in '99.
Once we've gone through the AI equivalent of the dot.com crash, will Anthropic still be scrambling for more capacity, or will they have more than they can profitably use, like the dark fiber we were left with last time?
Depends when it happens. I'm sure they'll take up whatever capacity is available.
At the moment computer providers are charging more for outdated H100 capacity now than when the H100s were new. That capacity is going to the smaller labs, not the frontier labs.
That hardware has already been depreciated financially so even if all those small labs disappeared it's not sending computer providers bankrupt - they can just cut prices and so long as they can charge more than electricity and maintenance they'll just keep them running.
