Frontier labs don't use most AI compute(yet)
OpenAI and Anthropic are rapidly increasing their AI compute capabilities, outpacing the industry growth. Predictions suggest that by 2027, OpenAI's data center capacity could reach around 12 GW, while Anthropic is also expected to grow significantly. This trend indicates a consolidation of the AI compute market among these leading labs.
- ▪OpenAI's data center power capacity tripled in both 2024 and 2025, with a projected growth of 2.5× annually by 2027.
- ▪Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate surged from $9 billion to $30 billion in early 2026, reflecting a 10x growth rate.
- ▪Both labs are aggressively securing more compute resources, including multi-gigawatt expansions with major tech companies.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 27 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ Frontier labs don't use most AI compute (yet) — Hacker News (AI / LLM)
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| Original publisher | Epoch AI |
| Canonical URL | https://epoch.ai/gradient-updates/frontier-labs-dont-use-most-ai-compute |
| Publication time | Sat, 23 May 2026 20:55:59 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-23T21:07:27.737Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-23T21:07:27.737Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | NdTVt0lQCgr0 · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Will Anthropic and OpenAI absorb the rest of global AI compute?While much of the world’s AI compute isn’t used by the top labs today, this situation could change significantly in the next few years. In particular, I think Anthropic and OpenAI are the key players to watch.OpenAI and Anthropic grew compute faster than the industry as a whole, at least in 2025.4 OpenAI tripled its data center power capacity in both 2024 and 2025; after accounting for improved hardware efficiency, their computing power grew around 4× annually.5 Anthropic is probably growing even faster, since they’ve been catching up with OpenAI in revenue and funding.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Epoch AI.
