Anthropic Revenue Grows 80-Fold in First Quarter

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the artificial intelligence startup saw revenue and usage increase 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis. The company had planned for a 10-fold increase. That gap explains the persistent difficulties in obtaining sufficient compute capacity, Amodei said Wednesday at the firm's developer conference in San Francisco.

"That is the reason we have had difficulties with compute," Amodei told the audience. He added that the company is "working as quickly as possible to provide more" capacity. The current pace of expansion is "just crazy" and "too hard to handle," he said, expressing hope for "more normal" growth ahead.

The comments came hours after the company announced a deal with Elon Musk's SpaceX. Under the agreement, Anthropic will gain access to all of the compute capacity at SpaceX's Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. The arrangement provides more than 300 megawatts of capacity.

Anthropic's expansion has been fueled by demand for its Claude AI models. Usage saw a notable jump after the release of Claude Code last year. Software developers have been the fastest to adopt the new technology, Amodei said. "Software engineers are the ones who are fastest to adopt new technology," he said on stage.

" That strain has affected reliability and performance for users, especially during peak hours.

The company has signed several compute agreements in recent weeks. One of those is a multibillion-dollar agreement with Amazon. Amodei said the firm will pass additional capacity on to users as soon as it becomes available. Anthropic is in talks with investors about raising cash at a valuation of $900 billion.

Such a valuation would exceed that of OpenAI. The startup continues to face a contentious relationship with the U.S. government and the Pentagon, which declared it a supply chain risk in March and blacklisted it from military work.

“We're working as quickly as possible to provide more" compute.”

As the legal process over the blacklisting continues, demand for Anthropic's products has only grown. The company is navigating the tension between explosive adoption and infrastructure limits that have become harder to manage.