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Anthropic raises $13B Series F

(www.anthropic.com)
585 points meetpateltech | 3 comments | 02 Sep 25 16:04 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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llamasushi ◴[02 Sep 25 16:29 UTC] No.45105325[source]▶
The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models.

What gets me is that this isn't even a software moat anymore - it's literally just whoever can get their hands on enough GPUs and power infrastructure. TSMC and the power companies are the real kingmakers here. You can have all the talent in the world but if you can't get 100k H100s and a dedicated power plant, you're out.

Wonder how much of this $13B is just prepaying for compute vs actual opex. If it's mostly compute, we're watching something weird happen - like the privatization of Manhattan Project-scale infrastructure. Except instead of enriching uranium we're computing gradient descents lol

The wildest part is we might look back at this as cheap. GPT-4 training was what, $100M? GPT-5/Opus-4 class probably $1B+? At this rate GPT-7 will need its own sovereign wealth fund

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1. docdeek ◴[02 Sep 25 16:55 UTC] No.45105738[source]▶
> The compute moat is getting absolutely insane. We're basically at the point where you need a small country's GDP just to stay in the game for one more generation of models.

For what it is worth, $13 billion is about the GDP of Somalia (about 150th in nomimal GDP) with a population of 15 million people.

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2. Aeolun ◴[02 Sep 25 17:27 UTC] No.45106246[source]▶
As a fun comparison, because I saw the population is more or less the same.

The GDP of the Netherlands is about $1.2 trillion with a population of 18 million people.

I understand that that’s not quite what’s meant with ‘small country’ but in both population and size it doesn’t necessarily seem accurate.

3. Aurornis ◴[02 Sep 25 18:26 UTC] No.45107079[source]▶
Country scale is weird because it has such a large range.

California (where Anthropic is headquartered) has over twice as many people as all of Somalia.

The state of California has a GDP of $4.1 Trillion. $13 billion is a rounding error at that scale.

Even the San Francisco Bay Area alone has around half as many people as Somalia.