Krishna Rao - Anthropic's CFO on Managing Compute, Scaling to $30B ARR, and the Returns to Frontier Intelligence

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (2:00)
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:27)
My guest today is Krishna Rao, the CFO of Anthropic. The center of our conversation is how he navigates the decision around procuring and allocating compute, which he describes as the canvas on which everything else gets built. We talk about what he calls the Cone of Uncertainty, the three chip platforms Anthropic uses fungibly across Trainium, TPUs and GPUs, and the daily meetings they run to allocate compute between model development, internal use, and serving customer demand. He explains where the returns to Frontier Intelligence keep getting higher, especially in enterprise, and how Anthropic thinks about the line between platform and application, and why they choose to build their own products like Claude Code. Krishna has such a unique seat watching one of the fastest growing businesses in history, and he is generous in sharing what he has already learned since joining the company two years ago. Please enjoy my conversation with Krishna Rao.
Krishna, I have been so excited for this conversation because you get to see from the inside one of the most interesting businesses in world history, at maybe the most interesting time in world history, at least if you're a technologist or care about technology. One of the things that fascinates me most is this question of compute that you have to deal with all day, every day, it's a key part of what you do, it's a key part of what these companies are doing, and there's just this whole revolution happening. I'd love you to just start by explaining what it's like to have to deal with that. I understand at one point you were having like a daily meeting about how to allocate the compute into who and why.
Bring us into that part of your life because I think it's right at the cutting edge of what's going on.

**Krishna Rao** (3:53)
The compute that we procure, it's the lifeblood of our business. It is the most important thing in the company. It's like the canvas on which everything else gets built. And so the decisions we make and how much compute to buy are some of the most consequential and hardest decisions to make in the entire company. Think of it this way, if you buy too much compute, you go out of business.