Anthropic's revenue and usage surged 80-fold on an annualized basis in Q1, forcing the company to rent Elon Musk's data center to handle infrastructure strain.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company had planned for 10x growth but instead revenue and usage grew 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis. Annualized revenue has climbed to $30 billion, a three-fold increase compared to last year, driven by corporate customers including Uber and Netflix adopting Claude Code.

To address compute shortages, Anthropic struck a deal to rent the entire compute capacity of Colossus 1, the Memphis data center built by Musk's xAI, providing access to 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and 300 megawatts of new compute within the month. The company is doubling Claude Code's five-hour rate limits across Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans and eliminating peak hour limit reductions on Pro and Max accounts.

In recent months, some Claude Code users have complained about increasingly strict usage limits and performance degradation. Anthropic admitted in a postmortem from late April that three bugs had affected Claude Code since March 4, and when users flagged issues in early March, the company said it could not reproduce them and did not attempt to fix the problem.