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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Half of that budget gets contracted out to Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop, Boeing, General Dynamics, etc. Those companies absolutely do spend money on the hyperscalers.
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.
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.