Another week, another eye-watering valuation for an AI company. The economics are so unprecedented that Anthropic — which raised another $65 billion at a $965 valuation — seems to be teetering on the brink of either growing too fast, or too slowly.
Iqonic Capital’s Matt Jacobson, who’s led multiple Anthropic funding rounds, has an all-encompassing saying to explain how this works: “Capitalism will find a way,” he told me this week after the funding announcement.
“At the beginning of this year, when the company made a few announcements, we looked at growth well ahead of our expectations. We wondered how they’d get the compute to keep up with demand,” Jacobson said.
That problem was solved, at least temporarily, with a blockbuster deal to rent compute from xAI at a cost of $1.25 billion per month.
Now, as Anthropic and other AI companies head toward public-market listings, there are other supply-chain strains: chips, memory, energy, cooling, and turbines to rattle off a few.
“We’ll see where capitalism finds solutions and what bottlenecks remain,” Jacobson said.