“The chief executive, Dario Amodei, said the rapid growth had exponentially increased the start-up’s need for more computing power.”
That’s something we’ve known for a while, and discussed at length. For both Anthropic and its sibling company OpenAI. The NYTimes continues:
“Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, said on Wednesday that his artificial intelligence company had planned for growing about 10 times as big this year, only to reach a growth rate that could make it 80 times as big this year instead.”
“Mr. Amodei, 43, made his remarks at Anthropic’s annual developer conference in San Francisco, where he and other executives gave a glimpse into the company’s plans. Anthropic is one of the world’s leading A.I. start-ups with its Claude chatbot and its popular A.I. coding tool, Claude Code, which people can pay to subscribe to. Last month, Anthropic said its annual revenue run rate had surpassed $30 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025.”
“At the conference, Mr. Amodei said Anthropic had been overwhelmed by the rate of growth, which has increased the company’s need for computing power to deliver its A.I. products to customers.”
And then a tech CEO who utters something seemingly heartfelt:
“I hope that 80-times growth doesn’t continue because that’s just crazy and it’s too hard to handle,” Mr. Amodei said. “I’m hoping for some more normal numbers.”
“To obtain more computing power, Anthropic has signed a series of deals with industry giants. At the conference, Anthropic said it had sealed an agreement with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all of the computing capacity from the rocket company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis. The move gives Anthropic access to the computing power of more than 220,000 Nvidia A.I. chips, the company said, and opens the door to working with SpaceX to create A.I. data centers in space.”
“As you saw today with the SpaceX compute deal, we’re working as quickly as possible to provide more compute than we have in the past,” Mr. Amodei said, using an industry term for computing power. He added that his company was working every day “to obtain even more compute” for users.”
“With the SpaceX deal, Anthropic said, it can expand the amount of coding that some Claude Code subscribers can do before they hit a usage limit with the tool. Anthropic offers people different pricing depending on the amount of coding they want to do.”
“Last month, Google, which has been a longtime investor in the start-up, committed to invest as much as another $40 billion in Anthropic. Amazon, another investor in Anthropic, agreed to invest as much as $25 billion.”
Per-token pricing is the variable that absorbs the compute squeeze in the open. Watch whether the labs hold prices steady through the next quarter or quietly raise the floor on enterprise tiers. A pricing move would confirm that the constraint is not just GPU supply but the unit economics of serving today's customer mix at the margins. The "compute throttle" framing only matters if it shows up in the bill.
Per-token pricing is the variable that absorbs the compute squeeze in the open. Watch whether the labs hold prices steady through the next quarter or quietly raise the floor on enterprise tiers. A pricing move would confirm that the constraint is not just GPU supply but the unit economics of serving today's customer mix at the margins. The "compute throttle" framing only matters if it shows up in the bill.