- 161.2B w/ Broadcom: 2026-2031
- 120.5B w/ SpaceX: 2026-2029
- 114.5B w/ Google: 2026-2033
- 110.0B w/ Amazon: 2026-2036
- 44.9B w/ Microsoft: 2026-2033
- 44.6B w/ Nscale: 2026-2033
- 41.3B w/ Lambda: 2026-2034
which is around $63.7 billion / year if spread over 10 years, but with most of it due earlier than that.
SpaceX was the only one mentioned as cancelable. These are listed under "Infrastructure Service Arrangements" on page 170.
If progress with frontier models doesn't continue at the same pace then the investments and funny money deals might start to look very fragile.
If progress does continue then that progress might be towards smaller models more than quantum steps up in quality or capability that would increase the risk of the scenario above.
All of this is set against a backdrop of public hostility and political problems that I can only imagine increasing in the near term as well.
This feels like an unusually high stakes game of poker. I don't think I'd want to bet on Big AI right now if I had a few billion lying around. Then again - maybe that's why I don't have a few billion lying around!
Is that really a viable path? (Honest question)
Those vendors would very much like to retain as much of that business as possible. If the space goes sideways, I would very much expect some kind of renegotiation/work out.
If Anthropic's revenue story doesn't materialize and the AI bubble bursts, these companies are in a world of hurt. It's probably not fatal for Google or Amazon but would be a major drag on the stock price (perhaps why Google has dropped from 400 to 315 over the last couple months as the AI story soured), and it could be company-ending for Broadcom or SpaceX if they end up building out infrastructure to service these commitments.
I remember before I left Google, one of the TGIF questions (which are now AI syntheses of many peoples' individual opinions) was "What happens if AI is a bubble and it bursts?" His response was "If that happens, the whole industry is in trouble." I see now what he meant.
Between SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, Neuralink, X, Grok, Grok Bot & Cursor there's not a demand shortage.
Grok Bot's the fastest growing product in the history of the company and the moment you use it, it's clear why. Took me about 1-2 days to realize I'd have a very hard time going back to not having it available.
If the AI companies go tits-up, that introduces counterparty risk, the revenue doesn't materialize as cash, and suddenly their earnings take a nose-dive. If they've staffed up significantly to design and sell these AI accelerators and suddenly there's no market, they could be in a lot of hurt.
BRCM and Marvell are both the actual designers of many of the “we designed our own ai chip” chips that so many companies have been announcing.
Broadcom is also a major supplier of the networking chips that the hyperscalers use. Clusters are moving away from infiniband and nobody is particularly impressed by Spectrum.
- 2026: $97.08B
- 2027: $97.08B
- 2028: $97.08B
- 2029: $97.08B
- 2030: $66.96B
- 2031: $66.96B
- 2032: $40.09B
- 2033: $40.09B
- 2034: $14.59B
- 2035: $10.00B
- 2036: $10.00B
Total: $637.0B
Considering everything that is cancellable, ie. hard commitment only, it's:
- 2026: $56.79B
- 2027: $56.79B
- 2028: $56.79B
- 2029: $56.79B
- 2030: $56.79B
- 2031: $56.79B
- 2032: $29.93B
- 2033: $29.93B
- 2034: $10.00B
- 2035: $10.00B
- 2036: $10.00B
Total: $431B
If they go bankrupt, there are some more cancellations available, also from the other side – if some providers don't deliver, it can be lower as well.
I also left out AMD at $20B for 2027, so that would need to jump up.
Finally, the above is only counting the commitments they've already made. It's not very likely they'll only spend $10B in 2035.
AMD is missing, true but commitment schedule isn't known. Also missing estimated additional TPU purchase for 28-31, ~$125B-$150B.
- 2026: $97.08B = Broadcom $26.87B + SpaceX $30.13B + Google $14.31B + Amazon $10B + Microsoft $5.61B + Nscale $5.58B + Lambda $4.59B
- 2027: $97.08B + AMD (TBD) = Broadcom $26.87B + SpaceX $30.13B + Google $14.31B + Amazon $10B + Microsoft $5.61B + Nscale $5.58B + Lambda $4.59B + AMD (TBD)
- 2028: $128.33–134.58B + AMD (TBD) = Broadcom $26.87B + SpaceX $30.13B + Google $14.31B + Amazon $10B + Microsoft $5.61B + Nscale $5.58B + Lambda $4.59B + additional TPUs $31.25–37.50B + AMD (TBD)
- 2029: $128.33–134.58B + AMD (TBD) = Broadcom $26.87B + SpaceX $30.13B + Google $14.31B + Amazon $10B + Microsoft $5.61B + Nscale $5.58B + Lambda $4.59B + additional TPUs $31.25–37.50B + AMD (TBD)
- 2030: $98.21–104.46B + AMD (TBD) = Broadcom $26.87B + Google $14.31B + Amazon $10B + Microsoft $5.61B + Nscale $5.58B + Lambda $4.59B + additional TPUs $31.25–37.50B + AMD (TBD)
- 2031: $98.21–104.46B + AMD (TBD) = Broadcom $26.87B + Google $14.31B + Amazon $10B + Microsoft $5.61B + Nscale $5.58B + Lambda $4.59B + additional TPUs $31.25–37.50B + AMD (TBD)
- 2032: $40.09B = Google $14.31B + Amazon $10B + Microsoft $5.61B + Nscale $5.58B + Lambda $4.59B
- 2033: $40.09B = Google $14.31B + Amazon $10B + Microsoft $5.61B + Nscale $5.58B + Lambda $4.59B
- 2034: $14.59B = Amazon $10B + Lambda $4.59B
- 2035: $10.00B = Amazon $10B
- 2036: $10.00B = Amazon $10B
Combined total: $782–807B+, including estimated additional TPU purchases and conditional AMD spending.
Got the numbers on a spreadsheet. Of course this is a super simplistic version assuming equal yearly commitments.
> Its largest commitment is with Broadcom, which co-develops the TPU AI processors with Google and leases them to Anthropic in deals worth $161bn over five years. From 2028, Anthropic expects to spend up to $150bn more on TPUs.
https://www.ft.com/content/a6c43402-719e-4295-ae5f-541edb0ae...
This is just the compute, which primarily covers training + inference. They still have to run the rest of the business. If you think AI should look like SaaS and spend 10% of their revenue on compute, that's $1T in revenue. If you think it's a hardware business, that's 30% margins and perhaps $200b in revenue. I went with something in the middle at $500b.
They won't disappear as a company at $200b in revenue, but I don't think that's their aspiration. These commitments imply to me that they're confident they can do much better.
I'd think it's more sound to just look at what percent of their current spend is on compute? Seems to be 50-60%
Idk where you got this figure from, but the actual figure are very different from that:
It's 120B over four years for SpaceX alone and 120B for Broadcom over 6 years. These two players, representing less than half of the total commitment, already give you an annual commitment above 50B.
But if you buy them today at a $1 trillion valuation, and they only make $40 billion in annual profit, your investment will go nowhere. They need to be growing profits at 20% per annum to justify a PE OF 25.
And then you have the competition problem. The cheap open weight models are good enough for many (most?) tasks.
And then you have the problem that LLMs may not be that useful outside of programming, customer support and law (and doing homework).
what you're buying into here is a company that is already large on the idea of growth over the next 10 years.
Modern IPO's just reek of investors cashing out
Google closed its first trading day "worth more than $25 billion" [1] with $1.5bn revenues, up 234% from 2002's $440mm [2]. That's a 16x revenue multiple, 0.07 growth adjusted [3].
On a similar revenue multiple, Anthropic's $16.3bn half-year earnings are worth $543 billion. Adjust for Anthropic's 1,400% YoY growth and you're well over $3 trillion.
Obviously, it's a lot harder to grow at a thousand percent from a $16bn baseline versus a few billion. But purely on a multiple basis, Anthropic is in a similar ballpark as Google.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/19/technology/shares-of-goog...
[2] https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312504...
Google was profitable, free cash flow positive and had no debts basically
Anthropic is burning money by the millisecond, no profits, free cash flow negative and has lots of debts & commitments
Comparables are not by peer group or sector.
It’s cash flows, growth and risk bud. If you want to do peer group - go ahead - just don’t forget to control for differences..
Price to sales multiples are internally inconsistent by definition.
In reality, a valuation based on revenue (sales) is bonkers to begin with, but even worse when you consider that Anthropic has so much debt that it doesn't have positive equity value, it's in a deficit ("When liabilities attached to an asset exceed its value, the difference is called a deficit and the asset is informally said to be "underwater" or "upside-down""). At least SpaceX has more assets than liabilities.
> SpaceX has more assets than liabilities.
is definitely a choice thing to write on the day SpaceX announced a $40B debt deal to purchase compute to run other companies' models. Based on available information, this will put SpaceX into a place where it has more liabilities than assets.
You're speculating what SpaceX balance sheet might be, like they haven't just released MRQ earnings report last week
Just go read it and you'll see you're wrong even after you subtract that 40 billion SPV https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1181412/000162828026...
Larger point stands. SpaceX is commanding a 62x sales multiple, whether or not you personally believe price:sales should be relevant. SpaceX's AI operation is smaller and growing slower than Anthropic's. It's reasonable to expect investors to benchmark Anthropic against SpaceX, it would be silly not to do so. A normal thing one would expect investors to do is assign a higher multiple to a company that grows faster.
To be clear: I do not have a financial interest in this, and will not be buying the IPO. I very much am just describing the world as it is.
Some people will benchmark Anthropic vs. SpaceX, that doesn't make it a smart approach.
A normal thing is to consider risk, liabilities, cashflow, how diversified revenue streams are etc., and other things which you seem to be missing.
I'm not trying to dissuade you from buying it. I'm just saying that the reasons you give are wrong.
Yeah, I would not pay 62x sales for SpaceX. And I don't buy IPOs. I'm not endorsing these values, I am saying benchmarking against peers is what investors commonly do.
> A normal thing is to consider risk, liabilities, cashflow, how diversified revenue streams are etc., and other things which you seem to be missing.
I'm not missing those things, I am not including them here because being "right" is rarely how markets value companies. (Also because the rest of that stuff is in the S-1.)
It's possible to build a "correct" model of a high-growth high-tech company that looks primarily at risk, liabilities, cashflow, and diversity of revenue streams. That model might put Anthropic at (say) a $100B valuation. That "correct" model is going to be less predictive than a model that starts from what similar firms are trading at in public markets. I personally am more interested in predictive power than correctness when evaluating stocks.
You are benchmarking against an outlier stock with a cult following (Elon Musk) and diversified sources of revenue. Anthropic does not have either.
If it was as easy as comparing the hottest new IPO with Elon's companies and applying the same multiples, people wouldn't have lost so much money on electric car IPOs that pretended to be Tesla (see PSNY -99.5%; NKLA -99.99%; FSRNQ -99.99%; etc.).
> being "right" is rarely how markets value companies.
Conventional metrics are how most stocks are valued most of the time. What you want to say is that market can be exuberant sometimes. That's fair. When the exuberance goes away, valuations come back to earth (see PSNY -99.5%; NKLA -99.99%; FSRNQ -99.99%; etc.).
> That "correct" model is going to be less predictive than a model that starts from what similar firms are trading at in public markets.
Even if we take your statement at face value, you're still not doing it right. A valuation based on comparisons has to have more than 1 peer to compare against. Check out the multiples of other model providers listed on the stock market. You'll probably be shocked that it's not a double digit multiple of revenue.
And then, if you really want to have a proper model, isolate the AI revenues of SpaceX and other hyperscalers, then we can argue that you have a model worth something.
Comparing != benchmarking. The only folks acting like anyone upthread is benchmarking to SpaceX are those who never made that comparison.
So in this case, diversified revenue is a drag on SpaceX because all the non-AI revenue is growing considerably slower.
But your point about Musk is taken. Cerebras went out in May, and despite being a hardware company is trading at 37x sales. Palantir trades at 78x, CrowdStrike at 50x, Cloudflare at 47x, etc. Anthropic is growing significantly faster than any of those companies. I'm not making the case that Anthropic will/should trade at any of those, just that Anthropic trading in the range of the P/S of SpaceX would not be crazy, and it would not require Musk to be involved.
> A valuation based on comparisons has to have more than 1 peer to compare against
Yes, the best peers are "public pure play frontier model providers trading in the US." There are none. SpaceX is closest, despite not really being a frontier provider and definitely not a pure play. But you are correct that investors will use a basket of stocks. It is silly to suggest SpaceX will not be in that basket.
You absolutely can make an AI doomer basket to model Anthropic. Use "real infrastructure companies" as the connective tissue since AI wants to be infra. In your basket put Caterpillar, Kroger, The Southern Company, AT&T, Comcast, and ExxonMobil. You can absolutely make the argument that Anthropic should trade more like them than like CrowdStrike or Cloudflare, that is a coherent position. Then based on that infra peer group, calculate a valuation. I think this model will be much less accurate in the near term than a model that uses other high-growth tech companies.
Price discovery is part of the fun of IPOs! The doomer model could be right, the stock value could collapse toward irrelevance as fast as the exchange's circuit breakers will allow!
Your argument is like saying that having gearbox in a car is a drag on speed, why not remove it? Just take out the transmission and the windshield while you're at it too.
> Cerebras went out in May, and despite being a hardware company is trading at 37x sales. Palantir trades at 78x, CrowdStrike at 50x, Cloudflare at 47x
None of those companies are AI labs, you're just cherry picking random expensive stocks and doing the whole price/sales nonsense again. All of them have positive shareholder equity (Anthropic has shareholder deficit).
> But you are correct that investors will use a basket of stocks.
That's your approach, I was just quoting it.
> You absolutely can make an AI doomer basket to model Anthropic. Use "real infrastructure companies" as the connective tissue since AI wants to be infra. In your basket put Caterpillar, Kroger, The Southern Company, AT&T, Comcast, and ExxonMobil.
At this point you're either being silly or arguing in bad faith. Your best case scenario is for Anthropic to trade like a stock with cult-like following and your worst case scenario is for it to trade like a ketchup stock. Completely ignoring the most obvious tech companies that are traded publicly and also provide models of their own. This conversation became so absurd that it's not worth answering anymore.
The mental gymnastics you're doing here are appalling.
Someone on a different forum fed the S-1 in Fable and it said "Shows a massive “loss” on paper, but that’s mostly an accounting effect from the company’s value going up"
Funniest shit I've read all day
99.9999% of the time someone sells something, the goal is to obtain cash. Throughout all of human history.
Obviously it's not like having Claude Code or similar, but those would be very hard to run legally and safely in EU regulated industries like us in energy production. You could run Codex but it would require your IT department to have yet another place to manage security and software integrations. Which is a fairly big issue when you have around 1 IT staff member per 300 employees, and an organisation which will buy five different sharepoint solutions for the same problem.
Microsoft sells something that seamlessly integrates into everything else you buy from them. It's easy to manage credit spending and when I say that I don't mean that it's easy to set it up. It's easy to track and budget so the right departments pay for it. It can read your emails, your onedrive, your loop, your sharepoint, your powerbi/fabric and anything else you have access to. Sure it's annoying to be confronted with a point you've made 7 months ago (like how you think Copilot is utter trash) and since changed opinions on it's frightingly good at finding relevant stuff, even in some obscoure legal document on your intranet.
I assume that Anthropic and OpenAI makes money of this somehow, but for the most parts our users wouldn't care if it was the GPT and Claude models or Mistral or Deepseek. Which is why I asked if they had really gotten it right.
A very large part of that revenue is paying for inference. There’s not enough leftover for the committed outlays. So it has to come from smucks I mean investors.