#现象/趋势

I am shocked, absolutely shocked, that Anthropic ARR has likely gone vertical in October after they cut token prices. Except the exact same thing happened for the entire AI market, which is why GPU rental prices have surged while token prices declined. $100b plus in year-end ARR looks possible again.

Gartner predicts cost pressure will force more than 80% of neocloud providers to cease independent operations by 2030. Hyperscalers face less risk because their large, diversified revenue could plausibly sustain AI investments for years. Gartner also forecasts AI-optimized IaaS spending will grow from $66B in 2027 to $174B in 2030. That growth is too low for most AI compute providers to recover their investments before current AI chips are replaced. AI data center owners would need $8.5T in cumulative revenue through 2030 to cover announced capex, financing costs and a 12% return on invested capital, yet Gartner forecasts attributable AI revenue of no more than $3.6T. On the current trajectory, more than $4T in asset value could be exposed to write-down risk through 2032, and Gartner does not expect the 12% return to be reached before the end of 2032.

Pretty much. As of the past few weeks, debt markets have almost entirely shut off access to money for any company that doesn’t have substantial revenue independent of AI data centers. SpaceX closed $40B of debt for GPUs, but we’re investment grade and have Starlink & launch revenue. That means the 200+ neoclouds are going to see guppy-level death and consolidation. Some will make it through, but not many.

@Yuchenj_UW I think we’re going to see a lot of stranded compute in partially complete data centers

NYU professor Aswath Damodaran ("Dean of Valuation"), published a long blog and says Anthropic’s IPO will be priced on run-rate revenue rather than valued on cash flows. > Justifying a $1.5T to $2T value for Anthropic requires very fast early growth, operating margins rising to 30% or more, compute costs growing slower than revenue, and risk falling to average as regulation and business models settle. > H1 2026 losses of $8.7B at Anthropic and $21.6B at OpenAI, excluding non-cash charges, rule out earnings multiples, making ARR the AI equivalent of dot-com eyeballs and social-media user counts. > ARR has no standard: OpenAI’s $50B counts partner sales net, Anthropic’s $65B counts them gross, and grossing up OpenAI produced the roughly $70B figure investors circulated. Both annualize monthly, a choice either can change. > VC rounds here price the IPO rather than value the business: Anthropic’s May round raised $65B at $965B post-money when expected IPO pricing was $1.15T, a haircut for delay or disappointment. > Pricing will likely migrate to 2030 or 2036 revenue and earnings, where 25 times 2036 earnings looks cheap only when wrongly compared with today’s multiples on current earnings. > The cheaper lab depends on the yardstick: at $1.5T to $2T, Anthropic looks cheaper on current and year-end ARR, OpenAI on 2030 revenue, compute and users, and both may simply be overpriced. > No listed pure-play peer exists, since Gemini sits inside Alphabet, xAI inside SpaceX and Muse inside Meta, so Anthropic will be priced against OpenAI’s private rounds or the Mag 7 and SpaceX.

It’s a bloodbath in Bay Area. Thousands of layoffs, more to come. Met a founder this morning who mentioned his AI tech is laying off 2000 call center workers. Not sure if society is ready for such upheaval. Gut wrenching