Elon Musk, the Tesla CEO whose SpaceX now also owns his AI company behind the Grok chatbot, and Amazon CEO Andy Jassy are clashing over where the market for AI computing power is headed.
Musk predicted on X Saturday "a lot of stranded compute in partially complete data centers." On Sunday he added that debt markets have "almost entirely shut off" money to companies without substantial revenue outside AI data centers, so most of the 200-plus "neoclouds," upstart firms that rent out AI chips, will die or merge. SpaceX, he noted, just borrowed $40 billion for chips.
He was endorsing a post by Chamath Palihapitiya, a venture capitalist and All-In podcast co-host, who forecast idle or underearning chips in 2027. CoinDesk's Omkar Godbole wrote up the exchange in a markets story that touched on crypto only in passing.
Jassy sees scarcity. On a podcast released Friday by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, he said Amazon Web Services' 2026 capacity is sold out, 2027 is "largely sold out" and "a good chunk of 28" is gone, despite $220 billion in spending this year. "I don't think that that shortage ends in 2027," he said.
He called demand a "barbell," with AI labs on one end and cost-cutting businesses on the other.
Anthropic's IPO filing hedges both ways
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, flagged both risks in the prospectus for its initial public offering, filed Monday. It said it has at times asked cloud providers for more computing power than they were willing to supply, and that some of those providers build rival AI and may favor their own needs.
Yet because it signs for chips years in advance, often agreeing to pay whether or not it uses them, Anthropic also warned it could end up "committed to excess compute that remains underutilized."
In an introduction to the IPO prospectus, Anthropic included the following paragraph about the risks of authoritarian governments using AI for their own purposes, a common theme of decentralized AI builders:
A keyword search of the document turned up no mentions of the words "decentralized" or "blockchain." The term "cryptocurrency" appears once, in the 400-page-plus document, in the context of cryptocurrency mining operations competing with AI demand for electrical supply.
The DeAI angle: Shortage or glut, idle chips are what decentralized networks like Aethir aim to put to work. BlackRock and Grayscale have suggested blockchains could help trade and finance computing power, though Blockworks found crypto providers handle a sliver of AI traffic. A glut would test them.
HOW AI WAS USED IN THE PRODUCTION OF THIS PIECE: I created the first draft of this story using Claude and custom skills. I then used the Distro Publisher MCP connector to file the draft directly to DeAI News on DistroVerse, the web app. I used the built-in DistroVerse story-editing interface to do the final edit and fact-check prior to publication.