| ▲ | nickysielicki 6 hours ago |
| Tens, maybe hundreds, of billions? That’s cute. The DoD will spend $961b this year. It does that like clockwork every year, year after year. Anthropic is not even close to too big to fail. And even if this could get settled in court 5 years from now, this can easily throw enough of a wrench into their revenue streams to kill their flywheel. |
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| ▲ | cobolcomesback 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| The DoD’s spend on cloud contracts is measured in single-digit-billions per year. It’s peanuts compared to the hyperscalers investments in Anthropic. Think of it this way: each of the hyperscalers have built a handful of data centers specifically for government contracts. A handful each. Meanwhile, AWS and GCP have dedicated over 50 new data centers solely for Anthropic to train new models, and more were announced today. My bet is on Anthropic. |
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| ▲ | nickysielicki 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | cobolcomesback 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | This isn’t “a few billion”. Maybe you missed some of the earlier comments. The hyperscalers have hundreds of billions of dollars tied up in deals with Anthropic. You’re delusional if you think these boards aren’t going to have a back room talk with Hegseth to smack some sense into him. This gets walked back next week, guaranteed. | | |
| ▲ | nickysielicki 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | The counterparty risk on those buildout contracts is not the same as their equity investments. Amazon isn’t assuming the entirety of that buildout exposure as a vote of confidence or form of investment in anthropic; they’re hedging it with insurance, credit default swaps, and MAE clauses. Those datacenters are AWS infrastructure that Amazon owns and can repurpose. The equity stake is the only part that’s truly at risk, and $8B is a rounding error on Amazon’s balance sheet. |
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| ▲ | QuiEgo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| That $961 billion includes things like airplanes and bullets, tech companies are only getting a taste of that pie not anywhere close to the whole thing. |
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| ▲ | nickysielicki 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Obviously, but that's a huge number and some tens-of-billions amount of that absolutely does flow towards hyperscalers. Contractors need compute. | | |
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| ▲ | deaux 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > Anthropic is not even close to too big to fail. Ironically, of all things Trump has done so far, closing Anthropic could set a new record for pissing off the highest number of people globally. Outside of HN with a group of dedicated people who is against it, the whole global software world is already running on CC. |
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| ▲ | adammarples 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| and? |
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| ▲ | nickysielicki 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | The cost of a company like Amazon or Google losing their piece of that $1T annual budget is greater than their exposure to the failure of Anthropic. | | |
| ▲ | rolymath 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not according to published Financials. Also $1T is dishonest. DoD spends less than 0.1% of that on cloud services. | | |
| ▲ | nickysielicki 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Source? Half of that budget gets contracted out to Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop, Boeing, General Dynamics, etc. Those companies absolutely do spend money on the hyperscalers. | | |
| ▲ | rolymath 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Great. So you've gone down from $1T to "half of that budget". If you're honest with yourself, you'll find the true number. | | |
| ▲ | nickysielicki 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | obviously, I was never suggesting that the DoD spends $961b a year on cloud computing. Look, it’s a very simple question: Amazon has invested $8b into anthropic. Do you think if the DoD disappeared tomorrow that Amazon would lose more than $8b in revenue over the next 5 years? I think you underestimate how large the DoD budget is and how many times that money changes hands in the pursuit of fulfilling contracts. $20b-$25b in revenue per year across all hyperscalers is a totally reasonable estimate. | | |
| ▲ | senordevnyc 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Why on earth would you compare $8 billion of equity investment in another company (which is likely worth far more now) to $8b of revenue? |
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