Anthropic Aiming for $1 Trillion Valuation

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Anthropic is planning to potentially raise money at a $1 trillion valuation. And on the same day, we have Cloudflare, who is cutting more than 1,100 jobs in kind of what they're calling an AI native reset. This is similar to what we've seen from Coinbase and what we've seen also from eBay. Snapchat has canceled their $400 million perplexity deal because their Q1 revenue for ad sales was $1.53 billion, lower than they expected. And we also have a bunch of new texts and information from Elon Musk versus Sam Altman lawsuit and a couple really interesting revelations come out of that. One, apparently Microsoft was worried that OpenAI was going to quote unquote storm off to Amazon before they gave them a billion dollars. They're worried if they didn't give them enough money that they were going to go leave them and go somewhere else. And so that's kind of what prompted Microsoft put a billion dollars in. Of course, that was probably the greatest investment in Microsoft history. So ended up being a great thing for them. We also learned that Microsoft was deeply skeptical of OpenAI ever achieving AGI before they put that billion dollars in. And one last juicy thing that we find is there's a bunch of text messages, about 78 text messages between Miriam Marotti and Sam Altman after Sam Altman got kicked out. Basically, him trying to get himself rehired and trying to get the then CTO of OpenAI to bring him back. And there's a bunch of viral videos that people are making of this where they're like turning into emo punk songs. And anyways, it's hilarious.
And oh, last thing we got to talk about is Apple's camera-equipped AirPods. They're getting near to be in production and they'll have Siri and AI built into the AirPods. I'm super stoked about that. Maybe the most stoked about all of these announcements. Let's get into all of it on the podcast. Let's kick this off with the big story, which is Anthropic coming in for a $1 trillion round of funding. According to the Financial Times, they've reported on this. According to the Financial Times, a lot of the demand on this is coming from, number one, sovereign wealth funds in Asia and the Middle East, and number two, from Google and Amazon. Now, when you do a colossal round like this, at a $1 trillion valuation, you have to have big companies or funds backing you. So this seems to be the source of where a lot of this is coming from. Some people are saying, hey, look, this is Google and Amazon trying to get in and double their money really quickly before the IPO happens or whatever multiple they think they're going to be able to pull off before an IPO happens. The IPO is slated for the end of 2026 So at the end of this year, could be in Q3 or could be in Q4. They're going to be trying to IPO according to what we're seeing from Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Both of them are pitching an Anthropic IPO between 400 and 500 billion dollars. So they are looking to pick up a lot of money. Something that's interesting to me though, with all of this is on the same day, we're getting a lot of this news out. We're also getting news that SoftBank apparently is going to cut its opening margin loan target by 40%.
So, they're bringing that down from 10 billion to 6 billion. Something a lot of people are talking about though is with the Goldman and JP Morgan 400 to 500 billion dollar IPO that they're looking at, the secondaries market is currently pricing private shares been Thropic at about 2x that. So there's a couple of different theories right now. Either number one, the secondaries market is just super overvalued, which is definitely totally possible. Or the bankers are trying to low ball the IPO price to try to create a rally on day one. Personally, I'm leaning towards a day one rally scenario, but we'll see what happens when this thing actually goes public and how much the appetite is. Between now and the end of the year, it feels like even then a lot can happen. Things are moving pretty quick in the AI industry right now and all around. Okay, the next thing I want to talk about is SpaceX's TerraFab commitment. They're going to commit $55 billion to this Texas AI chip plant, and that could hit $119 billion if some of the later phases get built out. So they could spend up to $119 billion. That is massive. This is all coming from a public hearing notice that was filed in Grimes County, Texas, and is tied to a request for tax breaks on the project. So this is a pretty good source. We're getting this kind of public information. This is all part of an earlier announcement that Elon Musk made in March of this year when he announced that they were going to target 200 gigawatts of quote unquote Earth compute and up to 1 terawatt of space compute. It's wild that we have to differentiate the two there. The reason why I think this is incredible is because SpaceX is a private and cash generating generating company. It makes a lot of its money from Starlink, but $55 billion up to $119 billion in spend on this Tarifab is absolutely massive. And that's on top of what they're already spending on their Starship development. So they also kind of expanded their Memphis Colossus expansion for XAI's separate kind of compute needs. And I know that they're doing some smart things financially. One in particular is that their first Colossus that they built for XAI, they actually just leased that out to Anthropic. So that data center in Memphis is going to be used there. Apparently, they have kind of a 2 that they're using for their own stuff. They are trying to make some money off of it, but it is wild just how much money they're going to have to spend for this massive tariff app. All right, let's talk about Apple's camera equipped AirPods. This is what I'm super excited. You've heard me rant endlessly on the podcast about how far behind Apple is because they haven't created their own AI model. Now, I'm going to say this might be a really incredible play out of them because number one, we got the news that Apple is going to let you pick if you want Siri on your phone to be powered by Gemini, Cloud or ChatGPT so you can actually pick the AI model. I think that's a great idea. These models go up and down in how powerful they are, which one's the best. Being able to easily switch between them would be great. I'm curious if you're going to have to log in with your premium account, right? So it's like you pay $20 for ChatGPT, you want to get premium.