TL;DR
By 2028, Anthropic and OpenAI may control most of the world's compute, driving up prices and interest rates, and potentially causing a debt crisis and power concentration.
In a podcast, host Dwarkesh Patel and chip analyst Dylan Patel discuss a chilling trend: AI compute is rapidly concentrating in a few companies.
They predict that by 2028, Anthropic and OpenAI will control most of the world's usable compute. Why? Because they turn compute into money better than anyone else, so they can outbid everyone for it.
Compute becomes a money printer
Now, a megawatt of compute costs about $10-15 million, but Anthropic can generate $50 million a year from it. With that kind of return, they are willing to spend big to expand.
But this pushes up interest rates across the economy. Everyone borrows to build data centers, money gets more expensive, and other industries and individuals face higher borrowing costs. Even governments struggle to service their debt.
Small players and countries get left behind
By 2028, China may have less than 30 gigawatts of compute, and its chips are less powerful. In contrast, OpenAI and Anthropic each have over 50 gigawatts of cutting-edge compute.
More scarily, if AI keeps improving, the 'effective labor force' of these two companies could exceed the world's population. Imagine: future work might be done mostly by AI owned by these two companies, leading to extreme concentration of power.
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