HN Explorer

16 comments

[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] thread
rogerkirkness
There is just no way all these data center investments in the trillions pay off. That has to be paid out of cashflow, like, real profit. The price to do useful things keeps falling, the payroll economy will crash long before there's actual trillions of dollars of cashflow for tokens.
budsniffer952
Sounds like you don't know what cashflow, profit, revenue and investment are.

Why on earth do data centres need to be built from cashflow???

keeda
I did some napkin math in a comment a little while ago, that if the whole shebang comes to a screeching hard stop where all these investments are written down to 0 and all AI revenue disappears completely, these trillions of debt could be repaid, with interest, by the hyperscalers with their pre-AI firehoses of cash flow in 6 - 8 years. It’s never going to be that simplistic, of course, but that doesn’t seem like a very dire situation.
tim333
The optimistic view is AI improves and generates significant value. You probably need it to generate of the order of 1% of world GDP for the investments to make sense.
dominotw
cant access bloomberg link. so they are "leaking" these numbers to press ? why ? i cannot think of any non shady reason to do so
seafoam
Anthropic would publish audited financial statements, if they saw it to be in their interest.
arjie
It's obviously not in their interest. Disclosing would only work as marketing for their IPO and it's the most anticipated IPO in history and needs no marketing. There is like zero positive side to disclosing audited financial statements and massive liability.
solomatov
As far as I remember there was report of their run rate. How does it align with this?
yread
I think it was 48B for 2026 so they got some growin to do
jonas21
They reported a $47B run rate in May. This article claims $4.7B revenue in Q1 and $11.5 B in Q2. It all aligns with a very high growth rate. Here's one set of numbers that fits (though I would guess the actual growth was spikier than this):

    Jan    $1.0 B
    Feb    $1.5 B
    Mar    $2.2 B
    Apr    $3.0 B
    May    $3.9 B
    Jun    $4.6 B
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
cactusplant7374
There is a narrative that subscriptions are subsidized. Perhaps we should consider that API users are being price gouged?
arjie
Inference is profitable. Even open models can be profitable. Obviously your cost of capital is the thing that influences that the most.
Arnt
There is such a narrative.

Many people have reported that their use would be drastically more expensive with the API. None have (afaict) reported how much the average subscription is used.

ashrt1154
The Mercedes Benz group has Q2 revenues of $36 billion and is profitable. According to Anthropic calculations, it has $144 billion of yearly revenue.

The market cap however is only $50 billion:

https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/MBGYY/mercedes-ben...

That means that Anthropic with its lousy revenues should have an IPO for $25 billion and not $2 trillion. All growth scenarios are a complete fantasy. They aren't even profitable and will never be.