Hacker News Turns Anthropic’s TPU Deal Into a Debate About AI Scale

A Hacker News thread with roughly 240 points and more than 100 comments pushed Anthropic’s latest infrastructure announcement into a broader argument about what AI scale now looks like. The company said on April 6 that it had signed a new agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity expected to come online starting in 2027.

Anthropic framed the deal as its largest compute commitment so far. The official post says the new TPU capacity will power frontier Claude models and help the company serve what it described as extraordinary customer demand. It also disclosed that run-rate revenue has now passed $30 billion, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, and that more than 1,000 business customers are each spending over $1 million on an annualized basis. The company added that most of the new compute will be located in the United States.

The announcement also reinforced Anthropic’s multi-platform posture. The company said it trains and serves Claude across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, and NVIDIA GPUs, while still calling Amazon its primary cloud provider and training partner through Project Rainier. Anthropic also emphasized that Claude remains available on AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure, which matters for enterprise buyers that do not want to standardize on a single hyperscaler.

Why HN cared

Readers debated whether gigawatts are becoming the simplest public shorthand for frontier-model capacity.

Several comments questioned how much run-rate revenue says about actual realized revenue, margins, and utilization.

The thread treated multi-cloud support and chip diversity as strategic resilience, not just vendor relations.

The interesting part of the discussion is that model quality barely dominated it. Instead, the thread quickly moved toward power supply, chip roadmaps, data-center constraints, and revenue interpretation. That is a useful signal in itself: for many developers and operators, frontier AI is increasingly discussed as industrial infrastructure, not only as software.