Anthropic has been battling a resource crunch which necessitated a collaboration with xAI to use its compute, and CEO Dario Amodei has now put into context just how exponential the demand for its models was.
Speaking recently, Amodei laid out the staggering mismatch between what Anthropic had anticipated and what actually materialised — a gap that explains, in no uncertain terms, why the company has been visibly straining to keep up with its own users.
“We had planned for a world of 10x growth per year,” Amodei said. “In the first quarter of this year, if you were to annualize it, we saw 80x growth per year — in revenue and usage.”
The number is massive by any standard. Anthropic had stress-tested its infrastructure for a range of scenarios, from modest uptake to aggressive expansion. The 80x figure blew past all of them.
“That is the reason we have had difficulties with compute,” Amodei explained. “We had planned for anything from it only grows a little, to it grows 10x — and yet we saw 80x.”
The compute shortfall has forced Anthropic into a series of moves that frustrated its user base: rate limits, session caps during peak hours, and the removal of Claude Code from its Pro plan for a subset of new signups. The xAI compute deal — which gives Anthropic access to Colossus 1, xAI’s flagship supercomputer — is the most high-profile response to date.
Amodei addressed that deal directly: “As you saw with the SpaceX compute deal, we’re working as quickly as possible to provide more compute than we have in the past. We’ll continue to do so. We’ll pass that compute on to you as soon as we can.”
He also offered a rare moment of candour about what it feels like to be on the inside of growth this violent: “I hope the 80x growth doesn’t continue, because that’s just crazy and it’s too hard to handle. I hope for some more normal numbers — AI normal. A mere 10x.” Then, almost immediately, the commitment: “We will manage it absolutely as best we can, and every day we’re trying to obtain even more compute that we can pass on to you. We’re sorry if sometimes it takes some time, but we’re going to keep going to acquire as much as we can.”
The 80x figure is an annualised projection from a single quarter, so it should be read with that caveat in mind. Even so, it corroborates a broader picture that has been building for months. Anthropic’s ARR has reportedly hit $44 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 — a roughly 5x jump in just a few months. Claude’s daily active users on iOS and Android grew approximately 5x between October 2025 and early 2026. The infrastructure was never going to keep pace with that.
The xAI partnership — a commercially pragmatic tie-up between two companies that are otherwise rivals — delivered immediate results. Anthropic doubled Claude’s rate limits for Pro, Max, Team, and Enterprise plans within hours of announcing it, and lifted peak-hour restrictions that had been a persistent irritant for power users.
The longer-term build-out is even more ambitious: a 5 GW deal with Google and Broadcom for next-generation TPU capacity, a nearly 1 GW agreement with Amazon, and a $30 billion Azure commitment through a Microsoft and NVIDIA partnership. Amodei’s comment that 80x is “too hard to handle” is less a complaint than an acknowledgement — that the race to keep Claude available is now, itself, one of the most demanding infrastructure challenges in the industry.