John Pfeffer

Free your mind. Your ass will follow.

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

I just published the latest version of “An (Institutional) Investor’s Take on Cryptoassets” https://t.co/VFX82fKWA4

[Jukan @COMPUTEX @jukan05]

What the SpaceX–Anthropic Deal Means

Two weeks ago, we published a note laying out what GPT-5.5's release implied. The conclusion was simple: whoever secures compute first, in greater volume, and with greater reliability ultimately takes the win. With OpenAI's 30GW roadmap dwarfing Anthropic's 7–8GW, we closed by arguing that the structural advantage on compute sat with OpenAI.

Less than a fortnight later, that conclusion is being tested. On May 6, Anthropic signed a single-tenant lease for the entirety of Colossus 1 with SpaceXAI — the infrastructure subsidiary that consolidates Elon Musk's xAI and SpaceX. The asset carries more than 220,000 GPUs and 300MW of power, and crucially, is scheduled to come online within this month. It served as the capstone of Anthropic's April blitz, which added 13.8GW of cumulative capacity over the span of a single month. On headline numbers alone, OpenAI took more than a year to stack 18GW; Anthropic has put 13.8GW in the ground in thirty days. The takeaways break down into three.

First, the compute pecking order has been redrawn again. Anthropic has now swept up the AWS expansion (5GW, with $100B+ in spend commitments over a decade), Google + Broadcom (3.5GW of TPU), Google Cloud (5GW alongside a $40B investment), and now SpaceXAI's Colossus 1 (0.3GW). Cumulative committed capacity, inclusive of pre-April allocations, sits at 14.8GW. This is still only half of OpenAI's 2030 target of 30GW, but the fact that the SpaceX lease will be live inside a month makes "deliverability" a qualitatively different proposition.

Second, Elon Musk is the plaintiff in an active lawsuit against OpenAI — and at the same time, the supplier handing 220,000+ GPUs and 300MW of power, in one block, to OpenAI's most formidable competitor. The timing matters: the deal was struck in the middle of the Musk–Altman trial. We read this as a deliberate pincer with OpenAI in the middle. In the courtroom, Musk works to dismantle the moral legitimacy of OpenAI's leadership; in the market, he arms Anthropic to absorb OpenAI's revenue and user base.

Third, the structure is financial-engineering perfection — a clean win-win for both sides. xAI can recognize $6B of annual revenue from a single contract, an amount that almost precisely offsets its Q1 2026 annualized net loss of $6B. It also accelerates the cleanup of SpaceXAI's pre-IPO balance sheet, with the entity now being floated at around $1.75T. Anthropic, on the other side, converts roughly $5B of spend into what it expects to be $15B of ARR via the coming inference-revenue surge.

(Mirae Asset Securities, May 8, 2026)

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

Perhaps we move to a world with 3 large frontier lab + compute companies / kereitsu / chaebols:
1. @GoogleDeepMind (already = lab + compute + capital + data + consumer and enterprise dist, etc.)
2. @SpaceXAI + @AnthropicAI (compute incl data cent in space + Terafab + front lab)
3. OpenAI + META (compute + lab + cons dist)

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

Now that the @AnthropicAI and @SpaceX deal happened, the next logical domino is for @OpenAI to do a compute deal with @Meta. OAI needs compute. META can redirect compute to OAI from its own failing/weak AI.

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

So obvious that @xai should do a compute deal with @AnthropicAI. xAI is using only a fraction of its compute capacity. Ant's revenues are severely compute constrained. Ant's revenues would rip and xAI would flip profitable. Right before their IPOs. @SpaceX @DarioAmodei @elonmusk

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

Why META and not @awscloud or @Microsoft? Because META can redirect compute from its own AI efforts and because META and OAI are both consumer focused, so a rapprochement makes more sense. AMZN and MSFT don't have compute to redirect to the same extent.

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

Lol. I love the simulation we live in! 😂

[Claude @claudeai]

We’ve agreed to a partnership with @SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity.

This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

@aashaysanghvi_ Me making this deal happen...

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

So obvious that @xai should do a compute deal with @AnthropicAI. xAI is using only a fraction of its compute capacity. Ant's revenues are severely compute constrained. Ant's revenues would rip and xAI would flip profitable. Right before their IPOs. @SpaceX @DarioAmodei @elonmusk

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

@L1AD Exactly. That was the blog post I was thinking about in the second leg of my last response to you. But there are signs that that Less Wrong post may be wrong. Pascal’s Economic Wager applies, but I increasingly think humans may always trade successfully with the machines.

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

As an investor, I once was concerned about whether capital would still have value in a world of abundance. While some argue that we will go post-capitalist in an abundant world, the opposite now appears to be true. We appear to be moving to a much more capital intensive world where returns on capital will be sustainably significant. Intelligence requires compute. Compute requires energy. Both require capital. Space. Robots. On and on. The economic version of Pascal’s Wager dictates that you want to hit the Event Horizon of the Singularity with as much capital as possible.

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

@L1AD Sure, but at the first level, the question was, would capital have any value at all post-scarcity. Answer's yes. And at the second level, maybe it will be harder to convert labour into capital after the event horizon. I don't know that I subscribe to the second leg, but maybe.

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

@MICH__ELE Stores of value such as Bitcoin should perform well. Each one has its strengths and weaknesses over different scenarios and timeframes. Bitcoin is the strongest of them all, provided it successfully crosses the Mythos and quantum chasms. The crown is Bitcoin's to lose.🙏

[Jack Clark @jackclarkSF]

I've spent the past few weeks reading 100s of public data sources about AI development. I now believe that recursive self-improvement has a 60% chance of happening by the end of 2028. In other words, AI systems might soon be capable of building themselves.

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

Very cool from my freinds @AlpenLabs

[Alpen @AlpenLabs]

https://t.co/c6Ojr7pGQ0

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

@jdorman81 Actually, @jdorman81 , the strongest public market play on the tokenisation of everything is @Securitize , which be trading very soon under the $secz ticker following its merger with $cept (Cantor SPAC, whose shares anyone can buy now).

@mdudas

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

@philpfef Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a must-read book for anyone and especially for builders. It was and is a key building block in my philosophy of life. So glad you liked it. I knew you would.

And please be careful on that bike @philpfef ! 🤗

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

Building on your challenge: assuming there are property rights, an essential and interesting question as we approach the Singularity will increasingly be what will be valuable (and what will the machines value).

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

What if the biggest (and most irreparable) shift in relative wealth in our lifetimes and for many lifetimes to come ends up being the shift of relative wealth from those who spent the entire Singularity calling it a bubble to those who saw the Singularity for what it is and simply geared their professional lives and their investment portfolios to benefit from it?

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

@ArthurB That's conjecture. And it's analogous to Pascal's Wager. No downside to having wealth and infinite upside to having it if it turns out that there are property rights.

And there's one asset that is seizure resistant and doesn't depend on external property rights. #bitcoin

[John Pfeffer @jlppfeffer]

#Bitcoin over the last 17 years was good training for this.