The Growing Compute Shortage
apollo.com54 points by dmitriy_ko 5 days ago
54 points by dmitriy_ko 5 days ago
This is written by a financial company that is pouring billions into data centres.
https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/pressreleases/2026/01/a...
https://www.apollo.com/insights-news/pressreleases/2025/11/a...
etc
So Apollo believes in the thesis strongly enough to put billions of its own capital behind it. That sounds more like putting their money where their mouth is than a rebuttal.
Or they invested billions and it behooves them to generate justification for that investment at a time when everyone else is also building railroads, I mean data centers.
That's possible, but it's still an argument about Apollo's incentives rather than the thesis itself. By all means scrutinize anyone talking their book, but then show where the analysis is wrong. Otherwise we've moved from “Apollo is conflicted” to “Apollo must be wrong because it invested,” which is not much of an argument.
Yes but how much of that compute shortage is from demand that is subsidized? We’ve seen companies like Uber drastically cut how much they are willing to spend on AI because they are paying actual usage costs, while at the same time OpenAI and Anthropic increase the limits on their fixed cost plans for individuals meaning people not paying usage costs are using it more and more… doesn’t this show that the compute shortage is because OpenAI and Anthropic are paying for it, not their customers? And the moment OpenAI and Anthropic stop paying for it, demand will collapse.
"subsidizing" aka making 30% gross margin instead of 90%.
Do they actually have net positive income (excluding research, I guess)? I assumed no but I’ve never seen number one way or another.
Anthropic is currently profitable, generating around $1B/quarter and ~$50B in ARR. About 75% to 85% of Anthropic's revenue comes from its usage-based API business, which has a gross margin that exceeds 80%. https://www.tradingkey.com/analysis/stocks/us-stocks/2620181...
Meanwhile, OpenAI is at ~$25B ARR, but is likely not yet profitable.
Where are you getting that 80% figure from? Even semi analysis, the most aggressively optimistic analysts, put it at around 60%.
https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-growth-and-b...
>The divergence in business models is directly reflected in financial data. SemiAnalysis estimates that Anthropic's overall gross margin has rebounded from negative 94% in 2024 to the mid-60% range, with the gross margin of its API business exceeding 80%.
Their link seems to claim semi analysis thinks it is 80%. It looks like it might be referencing this newer article from them, as the same picture is in both articles, but I didn't feel like paying to find out: https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/anthropic-3q26-profit-...
It's clearly listed in the article I linked. The number comes from SemiAnalysis, from a newer report than the one you cited.
Looks like it’s behind a paywall. I’ll take their word for it that semi analysis now estimate it to be 80%. That makes my point even stronger, if that number is true, where is the money? The report says that Anthropic generate over $50bn in revenue so at 80% margins that gives $40bn in profit. Where is that money? If they’re generating $40bn in profit, even after accounting for very high employee compensation and training costs… they should have tens of billions in profit, yet they’re out raising tens of billions instead. Where is the money going? And if only 20% is their actual inference costs, where are all these compute providers going to make their money? The world is at compute capacity on, what, $10bn in revenue?
If you figured out how to build a machine that turns electricity into gold with an 80% margin, of course you’d go out raising capital to build more machines.
Your contention is they're spending it on what, exactly? Leaks put OpenAI's training spend at single-digit billions so that can't be the machines they're building, and they (OpenAI + Anthropic) are famously renting/leasing/borrowing compute through varying-degrees-of-circular deals... so what's the machines they're building?