curated · 2026-08-25

Two sources picked up this podcast episode, which tells me Patel's centralization thesis is hitting a nerve. He lays out specific numbers: Anthropic and OpenAI took about 30% of new compute this year, that jumps to 40-50% next year, and by 2028 they could control most of the world's usable FLOPs. The mechanism is straightforward—Anthropic is generating $50M per megawatt in inference revenue against $10-15M in costs, and all that profit gets funneled back into training. It's a flywheel that's hard for anyone else to match. Both sources framed the story identically around centralization, which makes sense since that's the headline claim from the episode. I'd take the 2028 projection with a grain of salt though. This is a podcast conversation, not a SemiAnalysis research note—Patel is sketching a trajectory, not publishing verified forecasts. The specific market-share numbers for 2028 aren't in the transcript, so the "most of the world's compute" claim is directional rather than pinned to a concrete figure. He also touched on China getting under 10% of new compute and the possibility of AI capex triggering a sovereign debt crisis, but neither outlet led with those angles. If you're using these numbers for anything serious, wait for the written SemiAnalysis piece—podcast estimates tend to be looser than their published research.