QED – Game Changer

Anthropic hit $30 billion ARR this week. Up from $9 billion at the end of last year. Commentators are using phrases like "fastest revenue growth at this scale in history," which is the kind of sentence that sounds made up until you check and it isn't.

I know this because Marcus sent it to the team channel at 8:47am with the message "THIS IS WHAT WE'RE BUILDING ON" in full capitals. No further context. Just the link, the sentence, and the implications left entirely to us.

We are, for the record, not building anything on Anthropic's infrastructure. We are building on a local model strategy that is currently TBD, as established in last week's meeting about Gemma 4. That meeting produced the backlog item. The backlog item produced nothing. The image thing, somewhere in the Q2 column, watches all of this patiently.

But Marcus doesn't make the distinction between "something that exists in the industry" and "something we are doing." They are, to him, the same thing. We are a technology company. Technology is doing things. Therefore we are doing things. Q.E.D. GAME CHANGER.

The CTO, to his credit, waited until 10am before forwarding the same article with a different link and the observation that we should "make sure we're positioned here." Positioned where, exactly, is left as an exercise for the reader. It always is.

I looked at the numbers again. Anthropic went from $9 billion to $30 billion in about three months. That's not a growth curve, that's a building falling upwards. And they've signed a deal with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity starting 2027, which is the point at which AI infrastructure stops being measured in servers and starts being measured in the same units as a power station.

Gigawatts – like they had in Back to the Future.

Marcus has sent the gigawatt article now. He has written: "WE NEED TO BE THINKING ABOUT SCALE."

We have eleven users in production. One of them is Marcus, testing things. Another is Dave, who I think stumbled in by accident and has never been back.

I am going to write some code now. The image thing isn't going to build itself, despite what the roadmap implies. Somewhere in a server farm the size of a suburb, Claude is generating responses for thirty billion dollars worth of customers per year. Here, a man has typed the word SCALE in a channel that three people read, and is waiting for something to happen.

Something is happening. It is just not here.