Dylan Patel – Two labs will soon control most of the world's workforce
In a Nutshell
Two frontier labs—OpenAI and Anthropic—are absorbing 40-50% of new compute deployed each year and will control most usable global AI compute within two years as their gigawatt-scale clusters triple annually while total world compute merely doubles. Their revenue per megawatt has already surged from negative margins to $30-50M, enabling self-funded expansion toward 100 combined gigawatts by 2028, while supply-chain bottlenecks (EUV mirrors, turbines, power) and regulatory constraints on model releases create the only real limits to their dominance. This concentration means virtually all AI labor and most of the world’s high-value cognitive work will soon reside inside two organizations, fundamentally restructuring power, capital allocation, and economic returns worldwide.
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The conversation opens with Dylan Patel of SemiAnalysis discussing how the world economy increasingly depends on lab economics and compute markets. Most GDP growth in America last year came from AI infrastructure.
About a third of compute coming online this year is for the labs (OpenAI and Anthropic), though it may be built by others and rented to them. Compute numbers are ballooning from over a trillion dollars in CapEx this year to more than $2 trillion by 2028. The labs are taking an increasing percentage of this, moving from spending tens of billions annually to hundreds of billions, with forecasts of spending trillions by the end of the decade.
This requires reshaping the labs' economics. Until recently, these were companies that mostly lost money. Anthropic started turning a profit in Q2, and OpenAI is believed to potentially turn a profit in Q3 with the rise of Codex and 5.6. A year ago, all their money was venture-funded losses. Even at the beginning of this year, it remained venture-funded losses. They've now turned the corner and are starting to profit, though new capital continues coming in to accelerate growth. More of their business is being funded from their own revenue rather than capital injections.
Over the last year and a half, their margins have skyrocketed. The base cost of compute tends to be around $10-15 million per megawatt. Previously, serving models like GPT-4 on Nvidia Hopper GPUs generated negative gross margin for OpenAI. Now, when OpenAI serves GPT-5.6 or Anthropic serves Opus 5 or Fable 5, their revenue generation has passed well beyond the incremental $10-15 million per megawatt. In Anthropic's case, revenue has gone as high as $50 million per megawatt.
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