😵‍💫 Anthropic, was going to grow 10x this year. It grew 80x instead.

Anthropic, was going to grow 10x this year. It grew 80x instead. It is now leasing Elon Musk's AI data center.

On Wednesday, Dario Amodei walked onto a San Francisco stage, stared down a room full of developers and said the growth at his company was "just crazy" and "too hard to handle." This is not something a CEO typically says publicly. This is not a hyperbole either.

Anthropic's annualised revenue run rate reached $30 billion in Q1 2026, compared with $9 billion at year-end last. The company had already modelled for 10x growth going into the year. What it reaped was 80x, and that is the reason paid users have been hitting rate limits for months, Amodei said. They literally couldn't build compute fast enough to keep up with people that wanted to use the product.

Anthropic's AI Coding Assistant (mid-2025): $1 billion annualised revenue in first six months. It has not slowed down since. Amodei pointed to software engineers as the first and fastest AI tooling users, and then dropped a line worth listening to: "It is a harbinger of how things are going to go across the economy." Anthropic now has more than 1,000 enterprise customers spending over $1 million a year each with the company, up from just around 500 in February.

The compute problem and an unexpected solution

The deal nobody saw coming was announced hours before Amodei took the stage, however, Anthropic. The company reached a deal with SpaceX to acquire the entire compute capacity at Colossus 1, the Memphis data center where Elon Musk's xAI constructed in order to train Grok. Anthropic: 220k+ Nvidia GPUs and >300 MW capacity going live before the end of July.

This is surprising for a couple of reasons, most notably that six weeks ago Musk was denouncing Anthropic's safety practices at the corporate level as obstruction. The deal happened anyway. As is often the case with Musk's explanations, succinct: SpaceXAI had shifted its training workloads over to Colossus 2 long before and leasing Colossus 1 made economic sense in light of Musk's IPO of SpaceX. Amodei's description was similarly concise: Musk "did not set off my evil detector."

In this case, the two companies got what they absolutely needed. Anthropic needs compute it can not acquire quickly enough through its partnerships. Data center as revenue line for SpaceX—before IPO Colossus builds on top of a compute stack already stacked with a multibillion-dollar contract with Amazon for as much as 5 gigawatts of capacity, and also separate deal announced yesterday alongside Google and Broadcom for another 3.5 gigawatt starting in 2027. For users, the news is tangible and immediate: peak-hour caps for Pro plus and Max plans are being lifted, Claude Code rate limits on paid plans will Essentially be doubled; Opus request volumes are increasing.

Where this leaves the race

As of recent weeks, Anthropic's revenue run rate surpasses OpenAI's $25 billion ARR--a comparison that would have been almost unbelievable just 12 months ago. Most of Anthropic's revenue - roughly 80% - comes from enterprise customers, not consumer subscriptions. It has over 40 percent of its top 50 clients: names like Goldman Sachs, Visa and Citi are on the list, in financial services.

The company is currently negotiating a $50 billion funding round at over a $900 billion valuation, which would exceed OpenAI's post-money valuation of $852 billion as of March. This week, Bloomberg has reported that US competitors Anthropic are considering a possible IPO in early October 2026, with Goldman Sachs and startups JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley already in preliminary talks. On the secondary market, Anthropic has already been briefly valued at $1 trillion.

The question out of San Francisco is whether Anthropic can take on OpenAI in the competition zone. Revenue settled that. What remains to be seen is whether the compute infrastructure that is being put together can actually physically keep pace with the demand curve the product sits astride.

The answer for now, however, is: just fit.

👉 Join our live stream tomorrow, breaking down the move.

26 students now belong to a new program OpenAI announced this week calling the ChatGPT Futures Class of 2026 and they each just got $10,000 grants.

Those who entered college and graduated with ChatGPT are the first of a new generation: they came to campus in fall 2022, and left for a world where AI is changing what it means to create. At an event earlier this year, OpenAI's education chief Leah Belsky framed the program in one phrase: that this generation isn't asking for permission, funds or expertise before starting.

At 23, one of the honouries is already Head of AI at a hedge fund. Based on AI tools, it is another mental health resources for underserved communities translated. The $10k grants include the ability to fine-tune OpenAI frontier models. Dollars are not the real signal It is that OpenAI is making a public wager that the people who shape AI as it takes root will not be those who built it, but those raised using it.

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