Anthropic Revenue Grows 80-Fold in One Quarter Prompting Data Center Deal

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company had planned for 10 times growth but instead saw revenue and usage grow 80-fold in the first quarter on an annualized basis. Amodei called the surge "just crazy" and "too hard to handle" during the company's developer conference in San Francisco on Wednesday. The rapid expansion created infrastructure challenges that the company struggled to meet.

That prompted Anthropic to reach an agreement to rent the entire compute capacity of a Memphis data center built by a rival. Anthropic's annualized revenue has climbed to $30 billion. That represents a three-fold increase compared to last year and has been driven in part by corporate customers including Uber and Netflix using Claude Code.

Customers have cited the model's agentic abilities as a reason for preferring it over some competitors in certain uses. Companies have also embedded the model through its API into customer service platforms and task automation tools. "Software engineers are the ones who are fastest to adopt new technology," Amodei said at the developer conference.

Anthropic issued a postmortem in late April that identified three bugs affecting the service since March 4. The company's internal tests had not caught the bugs, leading to several weeks of degraded performance.

When users first reported the issues in early March the company said it could not reproduce them and did not initially address the problem. Some users said on social media over recent weeks that they canceled subscriptions because of the performance issues.

It will double Claude Code's five-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, Team and seat-based Enterprise plans. The deal also removes peak hour limit reductions on Pro and Max accounts. The changes are intended to allow for higher usage limits across paid plans and the API.

Anthropic has reached other compute agreements in recent weeks. In early April the company signed a joint deal with Google and Broadcom for access to five gigawatts of compute capacity, followed less than a month later by an agreement with Amazon Web Services for up to another five gigawatts in exchange for more than $100 billion in spending on AWS services over the next decade.

Amodei said he is hoping eventually for "more normal" expansion.