Anthropic's profit just disappeared. That's good news

Last week, I went through Anthropic's financials and I was shocked. Turns out Anthropic makes a lot of money. For every $1 of compute they invest, they roughly make about $2 of revenue, except today, they released their Q3 financials and turns out all that profit is gone, despite making $17 billion over the last 3 months, which is up 47% from the last quarter.Anthropic owes one of the largest compute bills ever, $895 billion. That is worse than the craziest bear prediction ever. And the worst part is $70 billion of that is owed over the next 12 months. So you have to ask the question, how is Anthropic going to pay for all of this? And it turns out some of the more well esteemed financial creditors are also gettingWorried, assigning Anthropic a potential junk credit rating right before the biggest IPO that we've seen in history. Now it's easy to argue the bare case of this, but what I want to present to you is something that is maybe slightly more optimistic. You see, the reason why Anthropic is losing money over the last 3 months is because they weren't able to meet customer demand in a suitable fashion. TheySo many people trying to access their models that they didn't have enough compute to go around, so they had to end up forking out a large premium to access that compute. Now, without getting into too much of the details, the idea here is, if Anthropic is able to secure enough compute over the next 12 to 24 months in these long-term leases, which capture around $900 billion apparently, and demand stays sufficient.They should be able to theoretically make a decent chunk of money. That is still a huge amount of risk, and I wanna dig into the bull and bear case of what's going on given these new financials, so let's get into it on today's episode brought to you by Qualcomm.So just to catch you up, Anthropic released their S1 last week, which gave us the entire financials for 2025 up till about end of Q2 of this year. So we got a peek under the hood as to whether Anthropic was making money, and a lot of people's opinions, including myself, was sort of skeptical about this. I didn't think that they were making as much money as I eventually then found out, plus I thought they were burning way too much cash. Turns out the actual opposite was true. Anthropic had around 10.$32 billion on their cash balance sheet and they'd only burned around $7 to $9 billion. And most importantly, the money, the revenue that they were generating was actually quite lean. For every dollar of compute that they would invest, which is arguably the largest CapEx cost to create these models and serve these models, they were making around $2.08 of revenue. Inference margin on that is around 85%. So that's crazy for any company, irrespective of whether it's an AI.Lab or not. But there were some very fair criticisms about this, which was, uh, Q1 and Q2, everyone was super hyped about AI. Loads of the Fortune 500 companies were doing something known as token maxing, so trying to throw clawed models at anything and everything to try and generate ROI, but that ROI hasn't quite yet been seen. And so the main argument that was given was, if we see the Q3 results and it backs up the Q1 and Q2 results, then we'll believe that Anthropic is making money. The issue is with the Q3.Results that we just got, it shows that Anthropic is actually making a loss to the tune of around $554 million. And this ties into the general sentiment that we're seeing, not just with Anthropic, but other major AI labs. If you look at OpenAI, the rumor has it that the most recent funding round that they've been trying to raise, $30 billion had to get slashed to $20 billion. They were trying to raise money enough to fund the compute and CapE spend over the next couple of months before they eventually IPO, I think early 2027 is what the rumor has it.And they had to slash that, but worse, they had to slash the valuation from $1.5 trillion which compared to Anthropic's $2.2 trillion is fairly conservative. They had to cut that to $1.25 trillion because investors didn't quite believe that their models were worth that much. Now putting that aside and looking at the crazy market dynamics that we've seen in stocks recently, we've seen semiconductor stocks draw down around 35 to 40% with neo cloud.And then we've seen Intel, Amazon, Microsoft, Google suffer major stock losses over the last week or so, despite record earnings. It kind of gives you the general sentiment that people are getting sort of concerned, and indeed, like lending rates for all of this humongous CapEx buildout is getting too expensive. So without getting too much in the financials, what does this mean for Anthropic's IPO which is rumored to go live in like 2 weeks? Well, first the headline numbers, they made $17 billion.Over the last three months. That is up 1,127% from that period last year. And it's up 47% from just three months ago. So they are still rapidly increasing their revenue rate, however way you want to look at it. And that means in the last nine months, they made around $33 billion. Over the same period last year, they made around $2.5 billion. So we've seen a 13x increase. By any means, the claim that anthropic is still.One of the, if not the fastest growing company that we've ever seen in history, still stands. But the question mark then becomes, is that even sustainable in the first place? Last quarter, or rather last week when we saw the S1 in Q2, we saw them make around an operating profit of, I think it was $974 million. Fast forward to today where we see their Q3 results and we see that they've actually got an operating loss of around 564.Million dollars, and there are 3 big reasons as to why they suffered that loss. Number one starts with $5 billion of short-term compute payments that they had to make. This wasn't estimated previously in the S1 because they didn't expect the overwhelming demand that they received for their models. So, let me kind of put something into perspective here. Anthropic and any other AI company needs to purchase access to compute.Before they know how much demand they're going to get. Think about it. If you try and predict the demand that you're going to have for your models, it's token consumption based. What I mean by that is you release a new model and you hope everyone likes it, and you hope everyone wants to consume as much of it as they can. And that applies for the most expensive model, but it also applies for the most cheapest model, and if you look at OpenAI, if you look at Anthropic, you realize that not only do they just release the latest, greatest, most expensive model.That is the most intelligent. They also release much cheaper versions of that, either at the same time or a few weeks later, and the idea here is it should cover all cost bases and customer types. If you wanted to code a company or business from scratch, you shouldn't need to have to spend so much money or use the most intelligent model all the time. So the idea here is it's very unpredictable to figure out how much demand you're going to get. So Anthropic invested a lot of money to get access to compute.Q3, but they underestimated it. And so the idea here is they needed to get emergency access to compute, of which they had to fork out $5 billion. Now, to give you an easy analogy of this, imagine that you run, I don't know, hottest restaurant in town, right? And everyone wants to book a table and you're booked out day in, day out. But one night you run out of ingredients. What are you gonna do? Are you going to turn people away and say, sorry, we can't serve you, or are you going to run down to the local supermarket?And buy the ingredients off the shelf at retail price, even though it's eating into your revenue margins, just so that you can serve up the product. That is effectively what Anthropic had to do, and if I had to guess, they were probably paying SpaceX, which is their primary short-term lease compute provider, a very hefty price to get access to this compute. So just because of this one maneuver, it meant that the compute costing around 48% of their entire revenue, which gave them the $1 in.$2.08 of revenue out, changed to 58%, so roughly for every $1 of compute spend that Anthropic invested in Q3 resulted in around $1.72. Still pretty good, but still notably declining, and you wanna make sure that that isn't a continual decline. Now the second thing that Anthropic is paying for that is going out of pocket is a little weirder. It's $2 billion of charitable donations matching for their employees. Now,I think about 2 weeks ago, I made an episode on how Anthropic is basically preparing for mass unemployment because they created this new charitable foundation which is committing, I think upwards of 10% of the entire company's equity valuation for the public good. The idea here is they want to distribute their shares and value of the company that it generates to the wider public because they're worried that people won't necessarily be able to earn.A livable income, and so they wanted to create some kind of universal basic income or universal high income to distribute the goods and wealth that AI is going to generate. This is that first step towards that, and it's going to the tune of $2 billion. The reason why this is significant is $2 billion on any company's balance sheet is notable, right? The fact that this is a charitable donation that is eating up against their margins should be noted.But it should be kind of considered separately, I suppose, which is the sense that if Anthropic is likely going to be doing this consistently, but probably not to that large of an extent, we probably won't see that as a consistent line item. So we should probably put that aside and just focus on the compute costs, which brings me to the third thing.The estimate of how much they're going to spend over the next 5 to 10 years, which is roughly around $895 billion. We were discussing rumors, I remember on this show as to what this spend might be like, and the initial rumors was $500 billion half a trillion dollars of spend.That alone I remember reacting to at the time was huge. It is humongous by any means, and I had no idea as to how Anthropic was going to be able to pay for this. Now, the worst bear case prediction was around $700 to $750 billion. Well, it turns out that the figure is way larger. At $895 billion you have to ask the question.Has anthropic kind of lost control of this, so I guess the way to look at this is let's actually break down how much of that is going to who and how much of that needs to be paid upfront, because the immediate payment over the next 12 months is $70 billion. Now the first thing I want to call out is that the total figure is actually not $900 billion it's probably more around 1.0.$5 trillion because there's around $150 billion that haven't been priced in yet. These are deals that they have signed in the early part of October, so Q4 Financials is probably gonna go crazy. But the idea here is, it's a very large sum of money. Now, $320 billion of that is signed contracts where Anthropic is like, listen, I want to getAccess to this compute with the likes of SpaceX, with the likes of Google, with the likes of other neoclouds. Now around $415 billion of that are like leases, which is, OK, if you build the data centers and you're able to kind of deliver that compute, we will pay you for this service. Now, I want to point a very obvious thing out, which maybe a lot of people don't understand.This is anthropic renting compute. It's not them owning the compute. Owning the compute would mean that there's like a lot of debt on the balance sheet. This is them renting it, so it's only dependent on if these companies, these neoclouds, these hyperscales such as SpaceXAI are able to deliver on the compute. But a lot of this is still meant to be paid for upfront. I think the figure is around 40 to 50%, which is gargantuan, and $70 billion of that.Is due over the next 12 months and $447 billion is due by 2030. Now, let's address the $70 billion first. That sounds like a big number, but when I look at their cash balance sheet from last week's S1, they have around $132 billion. OK, so they should be able to cover that. And then if they IPO over the next couple of weeks, the rumors say that they're trying to raise around $100 billion that should cover that with a bit of extra room, certainly, right?But they keep signing more expensive leases and crazy compute deals, so the massive bet that Anthropic is taking is, if we sign enough of these long-term compute deals, and we keep generating enough demand for our products, for our models, and so we generate increasing amounts of revenue quarter upon quarter, we will end up being able to net a much higher margin for the amount that we're investing, so.It seems like a big deal upfront over here, but it's eventually gonna end up in us earning way more profit than if we were to buy the compute in response to demand, which they did over the last three months and ended up eating into their profit. So they're trying to work against that scenario actually happening. OK, but where is this money going? Well, you have around $121 billion going to SpaceX, and as you know, Anthropic's paying them around $3.1 billion per month.Elon Musk is rubbing his hands and smiling gleefully because he's making a ton of money. It's what led to the first positive revenue earnings of SpaceX a few weeks ago. Now, another $120 billion is going to Google for access to their TPUs. Remember, Anthropic has one of the most diverse GPU clusters, meaning they aren't just reliant on Nvidia, they're reliant on Google's TPUs, which is their own versions of GPUs, as well as a number of different ASIs, which are specialized versions of GPUs. Uh, they're also.Working on their own chip in partnership with Broadcom. So the idea here is, if they have this diversified stack, they should be able to continue training Claude in as many different ways with as much flexibility as they can versus someone like OpenAI which arguably has a lot more concentration risk on Nvidia. Then you have another $110 billion going to Amazon, and you have around another, let's call it $100 billion going to say Neoclouds, and then the Broadcom deal which I mentioned just.Now is around $125 billion. So all big figures concentrated to around, I wanna say 4 to 6 companies. And the circular economy sort of keeps on going there. I, I wanna call that out, right? Cause a lot of these companies are invested in anthropic. You've got Amazon and Google, which I think collectively own around 25% of anthropic pre-IPO. And then you've got, uh, Google owning a significant chunk of SpaceX. You've got SpaceX kind of in bed with Nvidia and Jensen Huang securing all.Compute, you've got Nvidia and Jensen Huang backstopping a lot of the neo clouds such as Escale, which is providing $45 billion worth of compute to Anthropic. So, uh, again, a lot of circular motion going on. And the question is, can Anthropic sustainably pay for all of this? Well, I answered the short-term, near-term thing, right, which is they have around $130 billion in their cash balance sheet. Probably they'll be fine for the next $70 billion that's owed over the next 12 months. But what about the remaining, what is it, $800.$10 billion over the next couple of years. Well, that's the bet that Anthropic is making, and there's no easy way to say this. They are betting that the continual investment in compute, in training better models, in achieving recursive self-improvement, AKA the model that is so far exceeding of human intelligence that it is able to automate a bunch of things and generate so much wealth for humanity, that model, if they're able to build that successfully, then they're gonna generate endless amounts of money.That is a big, risky, and some might say far-fetched bet. Now, the bear case is they aren't able to build that in any short time span, and we're already seeing kind of these AI model labs restricting the release of their AI models. Rumor has it that Anthropic's been sitting on Fable 5.5, which is the code name of their next big model drop. OpenAir has been doing the same thing because it hasn't been able to sufficiently satisfy alignment procedures, which means that if you release the model right now, it would go out and do a bunch of crazy shit like.Cyber hacks, bioweapons, exploits and stuff like that. So the idea is, there's this push and pull, regulations are getting involved, and most importantly, data centers are getting harder to stand up. I mentioned on an episode last week that there's hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of GPUs collecting dust in warehouses because we haven't got the power or the energy grid, or just the technical expertise to stand these up. So the idea here is things might potentially slow down, which means that Anthropic makes less revenue, which means that they aren't able to meet their.bills, which means that this whole thing, this house of cards ends up collapsing. Now, I want to point out that this is a very big risk to take, and there are great arguments to argue why Anthropic won't be able to pull this off, and great arguments to say that they will. It's my inclination that if we're able to continue this acceleration, and we're seeing it kind of recently on the periphery where you've got internal open air models solving a lot of hard, complex challenges in math and physics, you've got anthropic models doing the same in medicine.Imagine a world where these models are able to do so at scale uh to many other people right now. You look at the spending budgets of Anthropic as well, right, where you see that it was less than 0.1% of the Fortune 500 customers that Anthropic has, which is quite a lot of them, have allocated that much to cloud models, so less than 0.1%. That is a tiny amount. Imagine if that scales up. By the way, what that 0.1% looks like is around.11,900 individuals or companies paying around $100,000 a year, and then you have around, I think it's like $2000 to 300 paying $10 million per year. Now, that was about a 600% jump up from that same evaluation from 3 to 5 months earlier. So can you.Imagine what that looks like, I don't know, a year, a year and a half from now. You can imagine that that 0.1% budget spend is going to increase to, let's say 1% or conservatively 5% of a company's spend, which I don't think is too crazy. And if a lot of that accrues to anthropic, that's going to be a large amount of revenue increase. So that's the optimistic take.Negative take is they won't be able to pull this off and we're gonna grind to a halt because we can't get the power to supply any of these GPUs in the first place, which I guess brings us to the final part of this episode, which is the bull and bear case for Anthropic's IPO. Is this a buy? Is this a sell? Is this something to be optimistic about or something to be concerned about? Let's get into it on today's episode brought to you by Qualcomm.My first point is the question has sort of changed from last week. Last week, the big question was, does AI make money? It was answered pretty explicitly. Yes, Anthropic is making a heck ton of money and they're doing so at a crazy growing rate.But now the question is, given this operating loss and given the explanation of why they're making that loss, AKA a lot of compute expense, can the demand come first before Anthropic has to pay the compute bill? In other words, can they generate enough demand for their clouded models before they have to pay the compute bill, so they need to make enough money to be able to pay it off before that bill arrives. Otherwise, you know, they run out of money. And it reminds me of something that Dario mentioned earlier this year, which he said,And he was kind of boasting, I guess in a way where I think it was, I forgot what podcast it was, but he basically said, I pride myself and anthropic self on the ability to not go all in on compute, and he said this at the start of the year because he said that is quite a costly expense and we have saved ourselves a lot of money and damage because we weren't able to do that.And of course, he ate his words a few weeks later, a few months later, when it was very much proven that scaling laws for training these models were very much intact, and that he needed way more compute in order to catch up, and that's in fact what allowed OpenAI, who was back then behind on models, allowed them to catch up to cloud models at the same proficiency because they invested so much in compute upfront. So what seemed like a pretty bad decision for OpenAI.Three months ago, ended up becoming a really good decision back then in January, February time. So, Anthropic in the same vein is making a very similar bet, and the answer to that will only be seen over the next couple of quarters, and it's something to definitely track. I actually think the best metric to track for this is what I mentioned earlier, the number of companies that are spending around $100,000 to $10 million per year.Are there more companies like that every single quarter? If that number keeps going up, then that tells us a very obvious thing, which is there's insatiable demand for this thing and the enterprise customer base, which is anthropic's bread and butter, is increasing in the way that you want it to. Now the second thing to point out is, I guess in favor of both the bull and bear case. In the bullish side of things, you could argue that,Yes, Anthropic made an operating loss, but it was because they had so much demand that they had to pay out of pocket for more expensive ingredients, if you want to use my restaurant analogy earlier.The bare case is Anthropic didn't even have a cushion or figure out a way to kind of satiate this demand or anticipate this demand, and that might end up with them blowing up. And like, listen, this is a high stakes game that Anthropic is playing. They don't have alternative revenue earnings from any other parts of a business. They are an AI focused company and they are betting the entire house on it. If you compare them to Google, Meta, Microsoft, they have more flexibility. Google has search revenue.Which I know is going down slightly, but they're making billions of dollars from that. And they have so many other product lines. You've got Meta with the same scenario as well. And so they should be able to kind of keep this expense afloat. Anthropic does not have the same sort of flexibility, neither does OpenAI. And the other thing I want to tack onto that is market sentiment is probably at its lowest that it's been since this entire AI hype started, I don't know, a few years ago. So the idea here is, have we reached the breaking point where no matter how much good news.A company can sort of surface, it's still going to be bearish from a public investment side of things. At the end of the day, Anthropic needs to raise $100 billion in roughly around two weeks. Will they be able to do it in the light of their second biggest competitor, OpenAI, not even being able to raise $30 billion? And we heard from Elon Musk last week that he even struggled to raise the $40 billion that he needed to buy more compute, and he has a very obvious business line where he just sells it at aPremium. So it's obvious that the market is questioning whether this thing has reached its breaking point. But on the positive side, so little of the world has actually been penetrated by AI in the first place. I think you could feasibly estimate that if they remain the top two AI labs in the world, they'll be able to capture a humongous amount of this revenue that would be able to pay for a lot of this cost. Listen, when I step back from all of this, I want to point out that I am probably one of the biggest.or biggest AI balls out there. But even I am a little skeptical as to how much money is going into this thing, and I want to acknowledge that it is a humongous bet. Now, I naturally lean on the side of thinking, if you are a long-term investor, then this is something that is obvious for you. Directionally, AI is going to go out there and change so many things. If even if you're not a massive believer in centralized labs, if you're a believer in open source or whatever that might be, the idea here is simple.AI is gonna improve in intelligence and it's gonna decrease in cost, which means that eventually it's gonna be able to run on any and all of our devices. We're gonna have personal agents that we can interact with at any single point in time that can do myriad different things for us. It's not just gonna be work related, it's gonna be leisure related as well. And so in that world, are you gonna be net net more productive, net net more successful, and make more money? What are your odds of that? Or are you going to lose more money?And consume many of these products. It could go either way. I tend to think that this technology is going to generate an enormous amount of wealth, and we need to be tentative in how we're spending and make sure we don't overleverage, but we do need to fund the buildout. It is now more important than ever. But equally so, if you are maybe more short-term minded and you're concerned about the inflated valuations of a lot of these neo clouds, the amount of money that's being spent on computer, most importantly, and this is.Very understandable and valid that a lot of these GPUs and compute aren't able to actually come online as fast as we wanted to, and so there's naturally going to be a slowdown, then that's fair, and you should sort of invest and trade accordingly. Again, like none of this is financial advice, it's just my kind of thoughts on this. I'm more long-term minded. I know a lot of our recent episodes have been market-oriented, but hey, the market's sort of calling for it. Stocks are down pretty massively, and I want to inject a bit of optimism, I guess, into the.This entire thing, we are going to see one of the biggest IPOs, whether you like it or not, in a few weeks' time, if I had to guess. My bet is a lot of the numbers that we are speculating to be bad a year from now is actually going to be.A lot more surprising. I think it's gonna move towards the upside, and if I had to bet where those numbers of Fortune 500 companies, number one, spending a larger percentage of their budget, certainly greater than 0.1%, but also two, spending tens of millions of dollars versus just $10 million a year on anthropic models or just AI models in general, I will bet you that it's gonna be much, much higher a year from now. And yeah, that's it. Thank you for listening to today's episode brought to you by Qualcomm.