Hacker News

points by nostrademons 3 days ago | 0 comments

On a side note, these are pretty hefty portions of the total revenue of these companies. 161B with Broadcom over 5 years is about 32B/year; that's fully half of their 2025 revenue. 120B with SpaceX over 3y is 40B a year, more than double their 2025 revenue and almost triple 2024. 114B with Google over 7 years is about 3% of their total revenue and about 1/4 of all Cloud revenue. 110B with Amazon is about 9% of their AWS revenue.

If Anthropic's revenue story doesn't materialize and the AI bubble bursts, these companies are in a world of hurt. It's probably not fatal for Google or Amazon but would be a major drag on the stock price (perhaps why Google has dropped from 400 to 315 over the last couple months as the AI story soured), and it could be company-ending for Broadcom or SpaceX if they end up building out infrastructure to service these commitments.

I remember before I left Google, one of the TGIF questions (which are now AI syntheses of many peoples' individual opinions) was "What happens if AI is a bubble and it bursts?" His response was "If that happens, the whole industry is in trouble." I see now what he meant.

[–] brightball 3 days ago

SpaceX will just use the compute directly if they don't have buyers. They are already talking about the data center shortage as well because they can't get capacity elsewhere either. It's a weird problem to not be able to use your own data centers because you rented them out.

Between SpaceX, Starlink, Tesla, Neuralink, X, Grok, Grok Bot & Cursor there's not a demand shortage.

Grok Bot's the fastest growing product in the history of the company and the moment you use it, it's clear why. Took me about 1-2 days to realize I'd have a very hard time going back to not having it available.

[–] blonder 2 days ago

A software product you can access via website or app being faster growing than cars, rockets, and satellites is not an indication of it being any good. It takes a lot less to convince a consumer to use it vs buying a car or starlink.

[–] brightball 2 days ago

Once people start using it, the usage is constantly increasing as well.

[–] Uke 3 days ago

And what is it, that makes it good?

[–] brightball 2 days ago

A lot of things. The UX for non-code related activities is excellent. They've removed the friction from setting things up by giving each agent their own machine which can give you remote desktop. The process of creating and working with each agent is as simple as naming it and then explaining it's job. You can keep feeding them information, ask them to train themselves, etc.

They can access anything you can, whether there's an MCP/CLI/API or not. I create speciality bots for each 3rd party tool that I use at this point. The bots can talk to each other, have group chats. You can give them access to the machines that you're running the software on and give specific bots permission to do things on certain machine (like an Obsidian bot that writes logs of daily bot activity on a specific machine with a Dropbox folder shared). I've got a Security Scan bot that downloads anything that a bot wants to download to it's personal machine at SpaceX and runs a slew of security scanners before the other bots can work with it.

I got locked out of one machine while I was travelling and I asked Grok Bot on another machine if it could get into that one over SSH, so it sent me a temporary authorization link via Tailscale, connected to the machine and restarted the stuck process for me.

The usability is off the charts. It's really like having a team of people working for you. I've run a conference for the last few years and was getting completely overloaded. Now I have 14 bots specialized just for the conference helping me do it better than ever and participating in architectural discussions to build a system that help long term.

If you find yourself trying to juggle a lot in your life and work, it's a gift.

[–] majky538 3 days ago

Also interested in use cases. I tried, but went back to "normal" life and apps.

It's not impossible integrate AI to projects/products directly.

[–] w2sdss 3 days ago

No the biggest problem will be investors will demand much higher dividends aka cash return..... how will alphabet continue to fund its projects with ever decreasing internal cash flows available after dividends? If the founders decide not to come good on this - the stock price will crash. If much of your employees compensation is stock based...? i have bad news for you

[–] monegator 3 days ago

one can truly dream

[–] demibabs 3 days ago

wait what, how is Broadcom worth so much with so little revenue?

[–] nostrademons 3 days ago

Their current stock price is pricing in these contracts, which have already been announced but have not been fulfilled (or booked as revenue) yet. So Broadcom's 2025 revenue was 63B; note that this is already up almost double from its 2023 revenue of 35B, largely on AI contracts. If Anthropic spends another $32B in 2026, that's in addition to their declared revenue; investors expect they'll be making $100B+ in 2026. Broadcom's operating margins are pretty good, so a lot of this flows through to the shareholders as earnings, and so investors are valuing it on the assumption that these contracts result in tangible cash flow.

If the AI companies go tits-up, that introduces counterparty risk, the revenue doesn't materialize as cash, and suddenly their earnings take a nose-dive. If they've staffed up significantly to design and sell these AI accelerators and suddenly there's no market, they could be in a lot of hurt.

[–] foobiekr 3 days ago

AI aura.

BRCM and Marvell are both the actual designers of many of the “we designed our own ai chip” chips that so many companies have been announcing.

Broadcom is also a major supplier of the networking chips that the hyperscalers use. Clusters are moving away from infiniband and nobody is particularly impressed by Spectrum.

[–] herodoturtle 3 days ago

I'm sure there are others here that are experts on this topic, but my 2 cents on this is that Broadcom specialise in custom / specialised AI chips, and their collaboration with Google to manufacture the TPUs is a pretty solid revenue moat over the next several years.

[–] tancop 3 days ago

AI focused investments and patent trolling.

[–] AlphaSite 3 days ago

Forward P/E.