By Jeremy Phillips
Publication Date: 2026-05-15 12:06:00
Happy Friday, all. Here’s some only-in-2026 math for you.
“If you buy too much compute, you go out of business. If you buy too little compute, you can’t serve your customers.” That’s Krishna Rao, Anthropic’s CFO, on the Invest Like the Best podcast laying out the existential math of running a frontier AI lab. Under-buy and “you’re not at the frontier. Same thing.”
Rao says he spends 30 to 40% of his time on compute decisions alone. He calls compute “the lifeblood of our business” and “the canvas on which everything else gets built.” I’ve been following the AI infrastructure trade for three years now, and this is the cleanest articulation I’ve heard of why three public companies are simultaneously suppliers and shareholders of the same private AI lab.
The three-chip stool
Anthropic spreads its bet across Nvidia GPUs, Amazon’s Trainium, and Google’s TPUs. Fungibility is the point. Get locked into one vendor and you inherit their roadmap risk.
Nvidia: the incumbent
NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA | NVDA Price Prediction) disclosed that “Anthropic will run and scale on NVIDIA infrastructure, initially adopting 1 gigawatt of compute capacity with Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.” Q4 FY2026 data center revenue hit $62.31B, up 75% year over year, and the stock is up roughly 20% in the past month. Total supply commitments sit at $95.2B.
Amazon: the deepest collaboration
Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) hosts Project Rainier, with over 500,000 Trainium2…