Anthropic Raised $10 Billion, But...
Anthropic and OpenAI generate cash by selling equity. Meanwhile, Google funds Gemini and its TPU chip effort with operating cash flow.
Anthropic is raising $10 billion at a $350 billion valuation, which implies a 50x Revenue multiple.
While I prefer Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 model for writing code, Anthropic has to tap the equity markets every few months in order to raise the capital required to build its models. Same goes for OpenAI and xAI. Meanwhile, Google (GOOGL) DeepMind has the best AI research lab, which is funded by Google’s healthy operating cash flow ($112 billion in operating cash flow through the Sept. 2025 Quarter and $64 billion in CapEx over the same period).
Google may have the best business model in all of Tech, which affords it the option to pursue dual paths on the AI front, to say nothing of its TPU chip effort, which forced NVIDIA’s (NVDA) hand as it relates to acquiring Groq’s technology and founder Jonathan Ross.
Regarding dual path optionality, Google has sufficient cash flow to where it can afford to invest heavily on LLM training, inference, context windows and the like (the status quo), while simultaneously pursuing novel approaches to cracking the AI code (the current LLM paradigm probably is not the answer to delivering true AGI). This is in contrast to OpenAI, Anthropic and xAI who can’t afford the luxury of heavy AI experimentation. These companies must stay the current course and iterate along the current path, for if they allocated capital to novel approaches to cracking AI, they would surely fall behind their frontier LLM competitors and would have to tap the equity markets that much sooner.
In other news, CEORater rolled out coverage of the S&P 500 CEO cohort. TEK2day readers should feel free to kick the tires HERE (CEORater methodology is HERE), before we wire the back-end to our payment processor (meaning access is free for the moment). Pricing will be $99/month (same price for the Website and API services), which translates to $0.19 per CEO. We will tell you all about it on the formal roll out next month.
Next on the CEORater “to do” list (Q2) will likely be onboarding Revenue CAGR rankings, followed by CEO equity ownership/sentiment (overview video below).