Not at this scale. Netflix and Uber aren’t trillion dollar companies now, and were worth way less pre-IPO. (Also neither is Anthropic–having a valuation of a trillion dollars just means that’s essentially how much you owe to investors). Anthropic and OpenAI are in insanely bad financial situations since much of the “investment” is just compute credits. To put it in perspective: it would be like you having to pay rent but you only get paid in is Applebees gift cards. They require a never before seen level of growth, which by the way, they’re already way behind on.

Sometimes when things just seem like they’re made up, it’s because they’re made up. A company that makes no profit AND is worth a trillion dollars says more about the “private marketplace” than reality.

Recently Amazon invested $5B in Anthropic tied to a commitment for Anthropic to spend $100B in AWS infrastructure over a decade. So for $5B, Amazon now has $100B of business in the books. These circular investments is just the printing of imaginary money.