Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic Fuel AI Infrastructure Boom
Nvidia, OpenAI, and Anthropic are arranging capital and ramping infrastructure for anticipated demand in AI. The three companies are building multi-year supply chains for chips, memory, and power at roughly $50 billion per gigawatt of AI capacity.
The echoes of the railroad build-outs of the late 1800s are real: those took two to three decades, with huge ups and downs, and the risk had to be managed across balance sheets and pools of capital. Nvidia is partnering with top institutional investors on a funding package of more than $500 billion for AI infrastructure over the coming years.
OpenAI bought back about $7 billion of shares from current and former employees in a tender offer, valuing the company at $852 billion. Anthropic has struck a $9.1 billion, 20-year compute deal with Riot Platforms to address its high-class problem of a hit product that eats huge amounts of compute.
The move is classic pre-IPO engineering: pruning the shareholder list before the roadshow and arranging capital for anticipated demand. The risk had to be managed across balance sheets and pools of capital, just like in the railroad build-outs of the late 1800s.