Open AI CEO Sam Altman speaks during a talk session with SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son at an event titled “Transforming Business with AI” held in Tokyo on February 3, 2025.
Tomohiro Osumi | Getty Images
As Anthropic gains momentum in the burgeoning AI market, OpenAI sent a memo to investors this week accusing its biggest rival of “operating on a significantly smaller curve” and characterizing the company as compute-constrained.
OpenAI plans to have 30 gigawatts of computing power by 2030, while Anthropic expects to have around 7 to 8 gigawatts of computing power by the end of 2027, according to a memo seen by CNBC.
“Even at the high end of that range, our ramp has made significant progress and its breadth is widening,” OpenAI said. Bloomberg first reported on the memo.
Concerns about OpenAI’s Anthropic are growing as the two companies vie for position in the rapidly evolving market for large-scale language models and artificial intelligence services. Together, the companies are valued at more than $1 trillion, and both are preparing for IPOs this year while trying to convince investors that they have sustainable business models that can withstand the pressures of competition from deep-pocketed companies such as: google and Meta.
Anthropic was founded in 2021 by CEO Dario Amodei and a group of researchers and executives who defected from OpenAI. Earlier this week, Anthropic, which continues to win in the enterprise market, announced a powerful new model that will be rolled out to a select group of enterprises as part of a new cybersecurity initiative called Project Glasswing.
In a note to investors, OpenAI pointed to Amodei’s comments about an intentionally conservative computing strategy and wrote that its approach is “different.”
“With each new generation of infrastructure, we are able to train more capable models, making every token more intelligent than before,” OpenAI wrote. “At the same time, improved algorithms and improved hardware reduce the cost of delivering each token, reducing the cost per unit of intelligence.”
OpenAI, which launched its generative AI onslaught with the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022, said it is benefiting from a “mixed advantage” where better infrastructure and models reduce costs, and better products translate into increased revenue.
“This leverage also allows OpenAI to continue democratizing AI by making our tools freely available to hundreds of millions of people, being more generous to builders, and putting that power in the hands of the people who are using our tools to create and solve problems,” the company said.
An Anthropic spokesperson referred CNBC to the company’s announcement earlier this week related to the deal. google and broadcom.
“To keep pace with this unprecedented growth, we are undertaking our most significant computing efforts to date,” CFO Krishna Rao said at the time.
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