In both China and the US, compute makes up more than 50% of the cost of running an AI company

Even with some of the highest pay in tech, AI companies’ biggest cost seems to be compute, not staff.

Across three companies where we have data (Anthropic, Minimax and Z.ai), compute accounts for more than salaries, marketing, and all other spending combined.

We broke down spending at these AI companies using financial reporting from The Information for Anthropic, and IPO documents for Minimax and Z.ai – two Chinese AI companies which recently went public.

Across all three, expenses were 2-3x larger than revenues. While Minimax and Z.ai say they do not plan to become profitable for the foreseeable future, Anthropic is projecting profitability by 2028.

We also think that compute was the largest expense at OpenAI, but reports on their financials are less clear-cut, so we omitted them from this analysis.

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