Yahoo Finance Tech Editor Dan Howley joins Market Domination to discuss Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) funding as its valuation nears $1 trillion.
Why are investors so excited? Look at these growth numbers. Anthropic's annualized revenue could cross 45 billion imminently. That would be up from 9 billion at the end of last year. Is Anthropic the clear AI enterprise winner, Dan?
I think at this point, yes. Uh but, you know, there's that's not to say that uh OpenAI isn't in the enterprise space. They absolutely are. They have their Codex coding tool, they work with uh enterprise companies as well. They're they're competing, you know, neck and neck. It's just that Anthropic is, you know, basically went after the enterprise market full bore, uh where OpenAI was kind of split between consumer and enterprise and and still are to a degree. And yeah, I think one of the things that that's worth pointing out is, you know, the annualized revenue, that's just based on uh individual quarters. It doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to see this growth long-term. Um, you know, we heard uh there I think there was like an 80X uh increase. I mean, that's not going to to be a years-long thing or or or anything along those lines when it comes to uh to revenue. A lot of probably what's going on is, you know, they've been backed up with compute capacity, just like, you know, OpenAI, just like Microsoft, just like Google, Amazon, they all are trying to get uh computing capacity to meet demand. And so when that comes online, they're able to serve that demand. And so, you know, I I think it's more to do with that uh than than any kind of, you know, massive catalyst that we we we were unaware of. But look, I mean, they are doing incredibly well as as it comes to AI, you know,
uh uh CEO uh Dario Amodei, basically said, 'Look, we're going to be more judicious about what we spend when it comes to our growth versus some other companies, OpenAI,' he didn't say it directly. Uh I believe a few months ago he said they're basically YOLOing when it comes to money, uh and and kind of just, you know, passing it out as as fast as they can, whereas, you know, he's made the case that, you know, Anthropic wants to make sure that they're buying what they're buying at the right time to serve customers and don't necessarily have this huge debt load hanging over them.
OpenAI is not sitting idle here either. To your point, Dan, apparently is going to spend 50 billion on computing resources this year. At what point do investors start asking, Dan, where are the profits on all this?
I think they've been asking uh and it's it's just going to get louder. You know, originally there was uh, you know, uh uh uh more than a trillion dollars worth of of spending that OpenAI was was saying that they were going to have on the books and that's come down since then. I think it's around 600 billion uh that that they plan to spend when it comes to building out. Uh but look, you know, all these companies are trying to get computing capacity, but it's expensive. It's not something that's cheap. and then they go out and, you know, they they spend this or they they say they're going to stand up a data center. Um, you know, they're going to rent a data center, what what what have you. and at a certain point, all of that spending, you know, has to lead somewhere. Uh we're seeing some uh good response from investors or or some positive response from investors from what they see out of, you know, the likes of Google or Microsoft or Amazon. Um, you know, those are companies that already have revenue on their own, not something that they're hoping to see, you know, and become cash flow positive in the future like an OpenAI or like an Anthropic. Uh so yeah, I I really think that they're they're going to continue uh to get louder these calls for, you know, at least some sign of when we start to flip that uh or pare back on the spending.