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Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows AI vision, surging costs

143 points · 150 comments · 6thbit

  1. camdenreslink · · focus · HN ↗
    Some of these numbers are crazy. The scale of them is hard to comprehend.

    - $42 billion net loss in 2025

    - $518 billion in infrastructure obligations coming up (EDIT)

    - 1/4 of revenue coming from 2 customers

    1. knuppar · · focus · HN ↗
      Factor in their margin being chewed through with every open model release.

      That spending obligation sounds extremely unlikely to be fulfilled without a bailout. Anthropic's IPO is them passing the hot potato forward.

      1. vineyardmike · · focus · HN ↗
        There won’t be a bailout. I doubt the obligations will even amount to anything substantial anyways.

        Many of these obligations are with the big clouds who don’t have capacity to serve them anyways. Google has said they have hundreds of billions in purchase obligations they can’t fill because they don’t have enough TPUs and data centers. Google gets a bigger marketing and investor headline, and there’s a queue behind Anthropic if they bail, so of course everyone would sign the commitments knowing the risks.

        I’m sure AWS and Azure are on the same page.

        In the worst case, many of their biggest customers have tons of GPUs (Meta, AWS), so they could always license out their raw models at steep discount to help absolve themselves of the obligations.

        Finally, in the worst case scenario, even with margin compression, they pre-purchased most of the compute so there’s not enough for the open models to run on. If Opus was the same price as Kimi/GLM, I doubt many people would pick the open models.

        1. owebmaster · · focus · HN ↗
          Yeah not sure about that. OpenAI and oracle are already losing money because of their obligations. They are already going to the worst case scenario and it's worse than you describe.
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