Welcome to another edition of the Fans Week Podcast, also on mediumwaves 1575 KHz for the greater Milan area. From Paris I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.
Dear Pressbeat readers, please accept our apologies for the previous piece on Anthropic. Yes, that formula was absurd – not in the delightful, Oxbridge way, but in the truly baffling way. Our dear Ami Carter-Wilson may have derived it iteratively on the CWP supercomputer, but we’ve since confirmed that the supercomputer was merely boiling water. We’ve replaced it with something real.
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei is doing what every Silicon Valley visionary does: betting the farm – and then some – on a vision so vast that even he can’t tell whether he’s building a revolution or a very expensive monument. The company has committed $413 billion in non-cancellable compute and chip spending. Non-cancellable. As if Broadcom, upon reflection, is going to just shrug and say, “Oh, alright, keep the chips.”
The burn rate? A staggering $4.7 billion per quarter. That’s 90% of revenue vanishing into the digital furnace. But fear not – mathematics provides the comfort that human intuition cannot. Enter the Net Present Value (NPV) formula:
NPV = Σ [Cₜ / (1+r)ᵗ]
Where Cₜ is the net cash flow at time t, r is the discount rate, and t is the time period. Simple. Elegant. Brutal. Because NPV, unlike Ami’s greek-letter soup, actually tells you whether tomorrow’s promised cash flows are worth the present-day hemorrhage. And yes, this formula has been verified by every finance textbook published since 1950. Unlike Ami’s, no supercomputer required.
Applied to Anthropic, the question is not whether Amodei’s bet is big. It’s whether those cash flows discount back to something positive when the dust settles. Right now, the picture is… optimistic. Optimism in finance, as the ancient Roman economists observed, is extremely expensive.
Anthropic is not just building – it is posturing. And posturing, much like Newton’s second law (F = ma), costs force. Every dollar spent on data centers is a force pushing against a valuation that hasn’t yet accelerated to match. The major Japanese banks are watching. Borrowing costs are climbing. And OpenAI’s counterpart in the AI infrastructure parade is not far behind, also throwing billions at the same furnace.
So here is the Oh Shit, Actually moment: if Anthropic goes public today, it won’t solve its problems. It will simply find them in a slightly different currency – public markets, public scrutiny, public doubt. A company that must keep borrowing to realize its vision is not building an empire. It is constructing a very elegant waiting room.
Reporting from Paris, for Pressbeat and Carter-Wilson Publishing – this is Jessica Carter-Wilson.
That’s all from today: from Paris, I’m Jessica Carter-Wilson.
