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ai-xyesterday at 4:59 PM7 repliesview on HN

People are going to be surprised by how obscenely profitable both will be in a couple of years


Replies

elliotecyesterday at 5:57 PM

If that ends up being true, they should be very surprised.

We're looking at ~$725B combined hyperscaler capex in 2026 (on a path to $1.08T by 2028) against roughly $25B of AI service revenue in 2025 on $250B+ of infrastructure spend. By 2030, the global data center build-out will require $6.7 trillion in capital expenditure. If hyperscalers require a 25% return on AI-specific capex, the industry needs to generate ~$169B in AI-attributable revenue annually by end of 2028.

A flexible compute market plus three well-capitalized competitors plus Google's internal silicon means nobody gets to hold price. SpaceX's public offering is the best signal we have on this type of thing and it's down 15% from offer price.

It's incredibly unlikely that BOTH OpenAI and Anthropic will be "obscenely" profitable in the next few years. Also very unlikely that even one will be "obscenely" profitable in the next few years.

It is more likely (but still not very) that they both will be simply profitable (not obscenely).

The most probable scenario is that ONE will be somewhat profitable (probably Anthropic) and the other still burning.

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0x3fyesterday at 5:27 PM

Seems unlikely. All three market leaders have roughly equivalent products, even ignoring the Chinese models. Google is better vertically integrated, as well. They'll end up competing on price, or worst case capacity rationing.

xnxyesterday at 5:31 PM

Tight competition and "obscenely profitable" rarely go hand-in-hand.

flextheruleryesterday at 6:02 PM

This essentially requires tripling the entire tech sector's share of the economy in a few years.

goatloveryesterday at 6:54 PM

Wasn't this also predicted a couple years ago?

andriy_kovalyesterday at 5:26 PM

if open models get banned