Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed that his company tried to plan for 10-fold growth — but revenue and usage actually increased 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis, explaining why it has been so hard to keep up with demand. GPU rental prices for Nvidia's Blackwell chips hit $4.08 per hour, up 48% from $2.75 just two months ago, while CoreWeave raised prices 20% and extended minimum contracts from one year to three. The Economist reports that weekly token consumption on OpenRouter quadrupled between January and March alone. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar admitted the company is "making very tough trades on things we're not pursuing because we don't have enough compute." New infrastructure investment will take 12 to 24 months to translate into available capacity, meaning limits will likely stay tight or get tighter through 2026. Amodei announced a new deal with SpaceX to use all compute capacity at the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, giving Anthropic access to more than 300 megawatts of additional capacity — the most immediately impactful capacity deal yet.
Sources: CNBC, Tomasz Tunguz/SemiAnalysis, Axios, The Economist
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AI Industry Hits Compute Wall as Demand Quadruples
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei revealed that his company tried to plan for 10-fold growth — but revenue and usage actually increased 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis, explaining why it has been so hard to
