The $100 Billion LLM: Where Will The Revenue Come From?
This next LLM build phase (2025, 2026) means $100 billion in cost per frontier LLM build.
Anthropic for example generated $2 billion of Revenue on their $1 billion (cost) LLM family, $200 million of revenue on their previous generation LLM, which cost $100 million. The company has raised approximately $20 billion to date and is working to raise money now. Anthropic would like to raise $100 billion.
Let’s play this out. The largest Dollar use case for Anthropic (and likely for OpenAI) is automating Software Development. The largest software company, Microsoft (MSFT), spent $33 billon on Research & Development in the fiscal year ended June 30th 2025.
What was global Software Development spend by the largest software companies over the past 12 months? $100 billion? Let’s generously assume it was $200 billion. $200 billion of Software Development spend is not enough to feed the beast that is Anthropic, OpenAI and Google, if each plans to throw $100 billion at their respective next gen LLM families, with the expectation of model revenue doubling model expenses for that vintage model.
$600 billion of revenue across three companies (GOOGL, OpenAI and Anthropic) by 2027, to say nothing of xAI and META - I don’t see where the revenue will come from to offset these outrageous spend levels. I am fully aware of the many other use cases.
The math simply does not work. Anthropic lost $800 million last year and will lose $8 billion this year. 2026 is the year that the LLM companies won’t hit their capital raise targets. Time for an LLM shake out.
See my related note HERE.