The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.

By Karen Kwok

NEW YORK, June 2 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Anthropic doesn’t have any trouble finding money. Just last week, the company led by Dario Amodei raised $65 billion at a $900 billion valuation. Sam Altman's archrival OpenAI raised $122 billion earlier this year, at an $852 billion valuation. What both ventures lack is a way to use their rising paper worth to solve the most pressing problem: a shortage of computing power. Public equity would be a handy currency for buying free-agent providers of chips and servers.

For as fast as Anthropic and OpenAI have grown, their expansion is ultimately limited by how many servers they run. Amodei’s latest deals with Amazon.com AMZN.O and Alphabet GOOGL.O, tying up more than 10 gigawatts of computing capacity over the next decade, should eventually ease the capacity crunch as demand surges. But another agreement with Elon Musk's SpaceX shows how dire the near-term shortfall is. For the equivalent of roughly $50 billion per gigawatt annually, the rocket-maker’s xAI unit is selling data-crunching power immediately, rather than promises of new projects.

It’s hard to directly compare this oddball, bespoke deal to other contracts. But Bernstein analysts estimate that CoreWeave CRWV.O is on track to monetize AI cloud capacity at about $11 billion of annual recurring revenue per gigawatt in 2027. Immediacy and scale have a price.

Little wonder then that Amodei and Altman are trying to control their own destinies. Just look at OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure venture with Oracle ORCL.N and SoftBank 9984.T, which aims to secure 10 gigawatts of U.S. AI capacity by 2029. Building from scratch takes time, however. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on Monday it could soon cost $80 billion to $100 billion per gigawatt.

The escalation makes acquisitions tempting. So-called neoclouds like CoreWeave or Nebius NBIS.O, both trading at nearly $70 billion market capitalizations, own plenty of capacity fine-tuned for chatbots. CoreWeave has more than 1 gigawatt deployed and over 3.5 gigawatts contracted to come online; Nebius has more than 2 gigawatts contracted.

CoreWeave and Nebius trade at multiples of roughly 8 times and 20 times their forecast revenue for this year, respectively, according to Visible Alpha. Anthropic’s $900 billion valuation implies a multiple closer to 30 times. If Amodei can sustain that on public markets, using equity for acquisitions looks very tempting.

The risk is that racy AI hotshots end up valued like lumbering infrastructure operators. If this really is a winner-take-all contest, though, it might not matter. In that case, whoever gets the chips first wins.

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CONTEXT NEWS

Anthropic, which operates the Claude family of large-language AI models, said on June 1 it has confidentially filed for a U.S. initial public offering.

Rival OpenAI also is preparing to submit an IPO prospectus, Reuters reported on May 1, citing unnamed sources.