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Comment by nickysielicki | Hacker News Reader

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The DoD’s spend on cloud contracts is measured in single-digit-billions per year. It’s peanuts compared to the hyperscalers investments in Anthropic.

Think of it this way: each of the hyperscalers have built a handful of data centers specifically for government contracts. A handful each.

Meanwhile, AWS and GCP have dedicated over 50 new data centers solely for Anthropic to train new models, and more were announced today.

My bet is on Anthropic.

That $961 billion includes things like airplanes and bullets, tech companies are only getting a taste of that pie not anywhere close to the whole thing.

Obviously, but that's a huge number and some tens-of-billions amount of that absolutely does flow towards hyperscalers. Contractors need compute.

Amazon's stake in Anthropic is (was?) worth $61 billion.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ai-bet-anthropic-soar...

It will be interesting to see how they handle this.

> Anthropic is not even close to too big to fail.

Ironically, of all things Trump has done so far, closing Anthropic could set a new record for pissing off the highest number of people globally. Outside of HN with a group of dedicated people who is against it, the whole global software world is already running on CC.

and?

The cost of a company like Amazon or Google losing their piece of that $1T annual budget is greater than their exposure to the failure of Anthropic.

Not according to published Financials.

Also $1T is dishonest. DoD spends less than 0.1% of that on cloud services.

Source?

Half of that budget gets contracted out to Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop, Boeing, General Dynamics, etc. Those companies absolutely do spend money on the hyperscalers.

Great. So you've gone down from $1T to "half of that budget".

If you're honest with yourself, you'll find the true number.

obviously, I was never suggesting that the DoD spends $961b a year on cloud computing.

Look, it’s a very simple question: Amazon has invested $8b into anthropic. Do you think if the DoD disappeared tomorrow that Amazon would lose more than $8b in revenue over the next 5 years?

I think you underestimate how large the DoD budget is and how many times that money changes hands in the pursuit of fulfilling contracts. $20b-$25b in revenue per year across all hyperscalers is a totally reasonable estimate.

Why on earth would you compare $8 billion of equity investment in another company (which is likely worth far more now) to $8b of revenue?

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