alt Hacker NewsSimilarly, the claim that "Once all the data centres are built, AI spending is going to plummet" feels incongruous with "it's hard for me to see AI consumption not being 10x what it is now" and "Anthropics revenue has to grow to 250 billion a year to pay off debt". Scaling up seems like a constant need, especially in a market that values growth and hype about frontier models so much. (that said, the author raises things like P/E ratios that I had no awareness of, so I'm not claiming to be an expert)
The debt thing is amazing since it ignores the interest on the debt and cherry picks Google's revenue from 2019 for some reason (which is then adjusted for inflation for the comparison).
If you have 20 years to pay off 5 trillion dollars, it doesn't come out to a neat 250 billion per year as that suggests there's 0% interest and no servicing cost. Servicing costs would probably be at least 3 times the stated figure, corresponding to 10% interest paid. Some of the debt may obviously carry less interest, but the financing is opaque (as the author admits to), we have seen interests rates creep across the economy and big tech has had hits to their credit ratings.
I hope the Liberal Party can find a better candidate than the author of this piece ...