Anthropic is at the mercy of 3rd party datacenter contracts. AFAIK OpenAI will soon run mostly on on their own GPUs.

I don't like Altman and I am still upset about his memory deal last year but he prepared for the current shortages months before anybody else. Meanwhile, Anthropic seems to lack any plans besides third party contracting. IMHO they got very lucky with xAI and Google having spare capacity and willing to rent it. But what about next year?

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lumost 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Which also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to NVidia's aggressive pricing. To my knowledge Anthropic is relatively well positioned across multiple compute vendors/hardware providers.

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abirch 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It also leaves OpenAI vulnerable to any GPU breakthroughs. You could imagine company X comes up with a XPU that is 100% faster than what's currently there.*

* NVidia GPU, Google TPU, Apple SoC, etc.

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karmasimida 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

You have missed the point

Nvidia has probably monopolized several upstream supplies to manufacture critical chip components for next 2 years, the HBMs and Optics component from LITE, as well as TSM capacity. Let alone those power components they funded themselves.

Let's say you have a genius design, but you will have it close to impossible to compete with Nvidia in getting it to volumes.

Jensen is a player, he isn't fooling around with all these Asian trips just to wine and dine

	▲	zozbot234 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		nVidia can only 'monopolize' these components for itself inasmuch as other industry players are not seriously interested in them. This can change rather quickly.

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jiveturkey 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

We are still in the short-half-life phase of GPUs. If a 2x faster GPU is on the horizon, why wouldn't OpenAI already be in line to buy? They aren't buying just 1, they are buying multiple datacenters' worth. So they wouldn't be a low priority, back of the line customer.

A short half-life means you are going to quickly dispose of what you have now, anyway. In fact most current datacenters can't even handle Vera Rubin, so I don't think there's short term risk here.

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manquer 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> their own GPUs

Everyone has critical risk on multiple parts of the supply chain. GPUs and Memory are just things OAI mitigated for.

Power - Bigger bottleneck than GPU or RAM perhaps, New Grid connected capacity is typically 10+ year timescale with lot of regulatory friction. Captive capacity is also quite constrained - now Gas turbines have 7+ year wait time.

There are plenty of hard constraints that OAI cannot easily solve either.

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dopa42365 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The same 3rd party datacenters from the same few companies that everything else runs on? If there's demand, hyperscalers will supply.

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outside1234 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Don't worry, they will buy up OpenAI's contracts once they implode.

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thereitgoes456 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Stargate is not real.

It is not clear that running one's own datacenter is a competitive advantage. Why do you think OpenAI can handle that?

	▲	Gomotono 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Stargate as a project is real, they only stoped the Stargate UK thing. Anthropics relativ longterm contract with xAI def shows that they can fill the capacity vs Musk not. OpenAI and Anthropic are both using a lot of capacity so its fair to say that this is an advantage. If they stay very close competitive (which they are), your own datacenter does reduce token price.

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llm_nerd 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Anthropic is at the mercy of 3rd party datacenter contracts

I mean, this is a bit like complaining that McDonalds doesn't have their own herds of cows. OpenAI actually isn't in the business of buying GPUs or running data centres, and it's pretty weird to think that's an advantage (though it comes up constantly on here, as Anthropic keeps eating OpenAI's lunch).

There are many suppliers that are desperate to fight for Anthropics business, and it has shown an agility to embrace whatever advances in the industry come along. Anthropic is now running across a million or so Google TPUv8s, for instance. If tomorrow someone else comes out with a better GPU/TPU, they can embrace it in a heartbeat.

All while OpenAI sits on their rapidly depreciating GPUs.

Or...actually they won't, because OpenAI doesn't take business advice from HN. The vast majority of OpenAI's compute is from Microsoft, Oracle and so on. They're smart enough to not become a big hardware purchaser when that isn't their business. The core claim of your comment simply isn't true at all, nor is that the direction OpenAI is moving.