Anthropic Raises $30B from Microsoft & NVIDIA & NVIDIA’s Core Business Faces TPU Threat
Jason Lemkin and Rory O’Driscoll debate Anthropic’s $30B raise, Nvidia’s TPU customer-concentration risk, and whether GEO/LLM search optimization is snake oil.
- Anthropic raised $15B from Microsoft and Nvidia at a $350B valuation, with $30B in Azure compute commitments; also announced plans for its own physical data center.
- Nvidia’s top 4-5 customers represent ~70-80% of revenue; Google’s $90B capex implies ~$36B in compute, handing Nvidia ~$20B+ in annual profit — making TPU investment rational.
- Google is now exploring selling TPUs externally, which O’Driscoll calls a meaningful medium-term threat to Nvidia’s profitability, especially if one large customer defects.
- Nvidia’s PE is currently lower than Costco’s; the core valuation question is whether $90B/year hyperscaler capex is steady-state or a cyclical peak.
- Sierra hit $100M ARR; Lovable hit $200M ARR and is rumored to be raising at a $6B valuation.
- Lemkin calls most GEO/LLM search optimization tools snake oil — his SaaStr blog gets 5M SEO views/year and he found zero actionable outputs from any tool he tested.
- Adobe acquired SEMrush for ~$1.9B primarily because enterprise CMOs demanded LLM visibility tools, not because Adobe had a strategic channel thesis.
- Figma’s IPO is trading roughly at the valuation Adobe offered two years ago; adjusted for dilution and time value, Lemkin estimates it is 30-40% below the Adobe deal price.
2025-11-27 · Watch on YouTube
