Artificial intelligence is dominating most news media, with coverage oscillating among fears for humanity, announcements of breakthrough advances, and trepidation about the impending infrastructure investment that could dwarf every previous industrial and technological revolution. Anthropic and OpenAI, the corporate developers of the most advanced “frontier” AI systems, hope, audaciously, to raise capital that values each of them close to $2 trillion despite the headwinds.
There is no precedent for these valuations except the recent offering by SpaceXAI that plowed new financing ground, but its business is diversified across space, communications services, computing infrastructure, and AI software. The enthusiasm for OpenAI and Anthropic is entirely grounded in their meteoric speed of revenue growth, now approaching $50 billion in annualized terms. Sustaining such growth is risky business.
