We will soon read that US is investing 50b into AI infrastructure by means of Anthropic commitments. Both balance sheets line up, no money exchanges hands.
NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, and OpenAI are all already engaging in this type of behavior.
Several parties are writing the checks. It's a complex structure of future VC rounds, debt financing, and most importantly, massive cloud credit commitments from their investors like Amazon and Google
"$50 billion investment" is classic "press release capital," not actual cash in a bank account. Anthropic isn't sitting on a mountain of cash. This is most likely a multi-year "commitment," funded by future investment rounds, debt financing, and possibly large pre-payments for cloud capacity from their investors, and it's a signal to competitors and the government about their ambitions, not a real $50B expenditure happening today
> We still need to fix the problem with powering these Datacenters....
Not really. We need to insulate consumers from the market that is solving and will solve that problem. That's a financial engineering and policy problem. America is good at the first. We're bad at the second. That implies state and local initiatives should take the lead.
My proposal: one market for essential residential consumption, defined as the median household consumption per region [1]. (If you don't use your allocation, you should earn a rebate.) Above that, market price. Same for preferred commercial uses, e.g. retail and local government.
This announcement isn't just for the construction companies; it's for the power companies.. Anthropic is basically saying we're going to build a factory the size of a nuclear plant here. If you start building it now, you'll have a guaranteed buyer in 5 years
Super large DC's yes. However, there is tons of what I call stranded power. Only need 1-2MW? Well, that's $30-100M worth of compute capex, but it really isn't hard to find power / space for that.
but it’s private money? who gives a fuck about the $/job created? if anything, it’s a good thing that Anthropic can afford to do it because they can so efficiently use capital. at least, so far…
Anthropic just borrowed 133 billion dollars from different investors in September, and 20 billion in total over 2025. Just where would they get such amount of actual money? Ask Softbank for a donation? Those guys do like to pour money into a fire pit.
Will this pan out? We don't know, no one knows. But this isn't "a scam" there is a plausible future where a large percentage of white collar (or dare I say it, blue collar) work will have an assistant and that assistant requires a considerable subscription (200/mo? 1000/mo?).
Interesting to see all of the leading labs in the West make this bet.
12k a year out of your paycheck for an advanced Clippy "assistant"? Sorry, this is not plausible. Oh and by blue collar work do you mean done by walking talking robots? I bet you think we'll be flying cars to work w/in 5 years too huh. Oh yeah and when is your chatbot going to solve physics and cure cancer again? You ppl have lost your minds.
1970-01-01|3 months ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45896707
throwaway81348|3 months ago
bdangubic|3 months ago
lispisok|3 months ago
zamalek|3 months ago
NVIDIA, Intel, AMD, and OpenAI are all already engaging in this type of behavior.
veunes|3 months ago
mgh2|3 months ago
veunes|3 months ago
robotnikman|3 months ago
JumpCrisscross|3 months ago
Not really. We need to insulate consumers from the market that is solving and will solve that problem. That's a financial engineering and policy problem. America is good at the first. We're bad at the second. That implies state and local initiatives should take the lead.
My proposal: one market for essential residential consumption, defined as the median household consumption per region [1]. (If you don't use your allocation, you should earn a rebate.) Above that, market price. Same for preferred commercial uses, e.g. retail and local government.
[1] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/use-of-energy/electricit...
veunes|3 months ago
latchkey|3 months ago
theultdev|3 months ago
the excess can be sold to the grid.
it's really the only way forward. seems like a win/win.
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
cowpig|3 months ago
> The project will create approximately 800 permanent jobs
Approximately $62.5 million per permanent job created!
keeganpoppen|3 months ago
klysm|3 months ago
Yizahi|3 months ago
mkl|3 months ago
13 billion, not 133, and it was VC investment, not a loan: https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropics-valuation-more-t...
Anthropic didn't give a time frame for that $50 billion spend, but it's probably more realistic than OpenAI's $1.4 trillion spending plan.
Eufrat|3 months ago
HardCodedBias|3 months ago
Will this pan out? We don't know, no one knows. But this isn't "a scam" there is a plausible future where a large percentage of white collar (or dare I say it, blue collar) work will have an assistant and that assistant requires a considerable subscription (200/mo? 1000/mo?).
Interesting to see all of the leading labs in the West make this bet.
diamond559|3 months ago
bfrog|3 months ago
agluszak|3 months ago
ares623|3 months ago
catigula|3 months ago
For $50 billion?
I think there's a serious problem here.
JumpCrisscross|3 months ago
It’s Capex. Most home construction produces less than a single permanent job on average.
AnimalMuppet|3 months ago
$62 million per job does seem a bit more hardware-heavy than reasonable, though...
KaiserPro|3 months ago
Good luck paying that back, especially as AI is basically commodity now.
eitally|3 months ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/EconomyCharts/comments/1lwdwd6/anth...
DANmode|3 months ago
Also,
> customers that each represent over $100,000 in run-rate revenue—has grown nearly sevenfold in the past year.
isn’t unconvincing.
tootie|3 months ago
xnx|3 months ago