Anthropic tells investors it makes 85% gross margins

The column responds to rising fear that the AI bubble is about to burst under mounting debt, a fear my colleague Liz Hoffman detailed yesterday, including a quote from an unnamed data-center financier: "We're not an ATM for your dystopian future."

The columnist's argument is that money is not the constraint. The bottleneck is physical: chips, memory, EUV machines, the refrigeration units that cool the GPUs, and raw materials like glass for components. But for that supply chain, AI revenues and user numbers would likely be growing much faster. Combined with Jevons Paradox — every jump in token efficiency spawning a new use case that burns more compute — that points to demand that keeps soaring, with the enterprise market only dipping its toes in and consumers not yet diving in.

Anthropic's 85% gross margins, even if a gross exaggeration, sit inside that framwork as evidence that these are cash-cow businesses able to service their debt. The columnist takes a different angle from the lender who complained about being an ATM: why lend for measly interest when you could invest for a massive return? That, rather than need, is offered as the reason hyperscalers and neoclouds reached for debt — it was relatively cheap.