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PG Peter Gostev On ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

“The bear case for companies like Anthropic … is that if the line is static, first of all below the revenue line, i.e., they're spending more on compute than they make in revenue. And if it's about static, then you're kind of screwed, right? You just buy more compute and then you're charging less money for it. What kind of business is that? And then what happened this year is that suddenly per dollar of compute, they're making $1.40 of revenue. And in Q2, they're making over $2 of revenue.”

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week · October 2026

“The bear case for companies like Anthropic … is that if the line is static, first of all below the revenue line, i.e., they're spending more on compute than they make in revenue. And if it's about static, then you're kind of screwed, right? You just buy more compute and then you're charging less money for it. What kind of business is that? And then what happened this year is that suddenly per dollar of compute, they're making $1.40 of revenue. And in Q2, they're making over $2 of revenue.” — Peter Gostev, ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week

Context

Explaining the compute-efficiency chart in Anthropic's S-1, which compares revenue with compute spending. He argues the jump in revenue earned per dollar of compute is what undercuts the standard bear case on frontier labs.

Transcript

ThursdAI - The top AI news from the past week Around 37:08 into the episode
Peter Gostev

…to get some speculation from our audience who are the top five customers. Their share has declined, which is a good thing, but I want to know what the top five customers are. There was some speculation, but I don't think we know. So they're paying Anthropic a lot of money, 20% in the last quarter.

Alex Volkov

…5.5 and SpaceX is mentioned, by the way, in the S1 as one of the providers. And the amount of money that Anthropic is paying SpaceX is also revealed finally, I think. I don't have the number in front of me, but that's also in this one. I don't know about the other three. Maybe more cool. I mean,

Peter Gostev

Microsoft must be right the big customer, you think. Yeah, so I don't know, but it feels like we're missing some information there. One thing that they highlighted themselves and a lot of people jumped on is the incredible compute efficiency that they're getting. And the idea there is that you can compare the revenue growth versus how much they're spending on compute. And then you put it side by side and you make the argument that. If basically, the bare case for companies like Anthropic, Copenhagen, and others is that if the line is static, like it was in Q2 2025 until basically the whole of last year, the line was first of all below the revenue line, i.e., they're spending more on compute than they make in revenue. And if it's about static, then you're kind of screwed, right? You just buy more compute and then you're charging less money for it. What kind of business is that? And then what happened this year is that in Q1 2024, suddenly per dollar of compute, they're starting making $1.4 of revenue. And in Q2, they're making over $2 of revenue. And if the line carries on in roughly that kind of way, then you can see how much more leverage they get on their compute. And this is super important, right? I mean, you guys would know you're in the business as well. And yeah…

Alex Volkov

Yep. And their investment in computer thing is like very, very palpable. Just an incredible document. Peter, we will add this to the stage. So, folks, if you want to check out Peter's graphs and charts, ant-1, it's search.sh. Is that the right URL? Did I type it correctly? I think so.

Peter Gostev

Yes. I mean, yeah, it's not easy to understand. So, yeah, we'll share it separately. Thank you for

Alex Volkov

prepping this and walking us through this. I think it's a very big moment, a very big moment in history. And nothing, I don't know if we really care about saying this, but I think usually people say this: nothing that we talk here is should be taken as financial advice, folks. Nothing, as we talk…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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