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Today’s Essential Episodes:
Atreides’ Gavin Baker on Anthropic’s S-1 Surprise, GPU Prices Flipping Into Contango and the Capital the SpaceX and Anthropic IPOs Unlock
TBPN, with John Coogan and Jordi Hays, and Gavin Baker, CIO of Atreides ManagementShopify CEO Tobi Lütke on Embracing Meta’s Muse as Amazon Blocks It, Agent Shopping and Choosing Volume Over Take Rate
Sources with Alex Heath, and Tobi Lütke, co-founder and CEO of ShopifyAnthropic’s Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang on Opus 5.5, CPU as the New Bottleneck and Rewriting the Messages API in Rust
Latent Space, with Katelyn Lesse and Angela Jiang, who head engineering and product for Anthropic’s Claude PlatformIntel Foundry’s Ravi Mahajan on EMIB’s Path From Science Fiction to High Volume, Why HBM Came First and How It Compares With CoWoS
Semi Doped, with Austin Lyons, and Ravi Mahajan, distinguished engineer and director of advanced packaging pathfinding at Intel FoundryBen Bajarin and Jay Goldberg on Micron’s HBM Roadmap, Lam’s $200 Billion WFE Call, Meta’s Owned-Compute Edge and NVIDIA’s Supply Lock-Up
The Circuit, with Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies and Jay Goldberg
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THE SIGNAL
Bear case Baker credits to an analyst’s post: Anthropic devoting 74% of its compute to training, so any drop in training intensity could release a large block of capacity onto the inference market and weaken the tight compute-pricing thesis.
Cursor used to be a major demand driver for inference clouds, and SpaceX has since moved Cursor’s compute in-house, yet Baker says the open-weight ecosystem still sped up and diversified, which suggests less single-customer concentration risk (our read).
Baker puts compute contracted before May 2026 at roughly $10-15 per watt, now deep in the money; he says CoreWeave is actively chasing more spot exposure and fewer big offtakes, a possible repricing lever (our read).
Baker reads the blank October ARR line in the S-1 as a sign that management expects a strong number; he notes OpenAI accelerated over the summer and Anthropic clearly reaccelerated in October.
01 Anthropic’s S-1 and enterprise diffusion
Baker, speaking as an investor at Atreides Management, describes the S-1 as a clear positive surprise, pointing to the $10B cumulative burn, profitability, and cash generation as better than feared. He cites an annualized revenue figure he reads as roughly $67B off the reported Q3 run-rate. Despite this scale, he argues enterprise AI penetration remains very early — possibly earlier-stage than he’d previously believed — given how small AI spend is relative to total enterprise budgets even among large adopters. Hosts Coogan and Hays push back with the commonly cited Ramp data suggesting a small number of companies drive most AI spend; Baker counters that the S-1’s own numbers (250 accounts over $10M, by his reading; a host cited ~11-12K over $100K) show a genuinely diversified customer base, a claim he treats as more authoritative than secondary data sources. He also notes open-weight model providers — Fireworks, Together, Baseten, Cognition — have been growing faster than either OpenAI or Anthropic since summer, a trend that held through Anthropic’s recent reacceleration; Atreides led Fireworks’ last funding round, which he says was hard to price because the company was growing so fast.
02 Compute pricing and the CoreWeave contrast
Baker’s central market claim is that GPU/compute pricing has moved into contango: spot prices are rising, but forward prices for clusters delivered in 2027 are rising even faster, meaning buyers pay substantially more to lock in future capacity than current capacity — a shift he attributes to remarks at GTC by the founder of Silicon Data, a firm Atreides has invested in and which he calls the most authoritative source. He says portfolio companies that secured Blackwell clusters for mid-2026 are shocked by the pricing demanded for a comparable cluster in September 2027, despite broad awareness that new supply is coming online. He contrasts CoreWeave — which a host described as reliable “diamond tier” infrastructure, and which Baker says locked in long-term compute contracts now priced well under market — with SpaceX’s more spot-market-exposed strategy. Separately, Baker cites CFO Sarah Friar saying her own company’s long-term compute commitments could now be resold at a 3-5x premium. Baker speculates Elon Musk reasoned from first principles toward shorter, spot-friendly contracts with fast payback rather than copying any peer. He also flags NVIDIA’s new DSX pod (announced at GTC Berlin) — a preassembled, rack-based deployment — as a meaningful innovation because it could shrink the typical three-to-six-month GPU “energizing” lag, freeing up working capital that would otherwise sit idle.
03 AI agents, biology, and commodities
Discussing personal AI agent use, Baker says Grok Bot has been the most impactful AI product for him and his firm, describing roughly 17 custom Grok Bots he has built, after earlier stitching tools together with Claude Code. On biology, he notes AI-assisted drug repurposing has already identified uses for decades-old compounds to treat rare diseases, though he concedes commercialization timelines remain long and rates the AI industry’s PR standing at roughly negative five out of 100. On commodities/energy, Baker says his firm tracks natural resources and energy closely but hasn’t made it a large portfolio allocation, aside from a private investment in a company developing a cleaner chemical process for rare-earth refining, an area he says DARPA has also pursued.
04 Financing the AI buildout
Baker identifies an underappreciated capital unlock: U.S. mutual funds are capped on how much of a fund can sit in illiquid assets, so SpaceX and Anthropic going public will free up significant mutual-fund buying power for the broader private AI ecosystem once lockups expire. He also points to sovereign wealth funds — particularly UAE-based MGX and Mubadala — as already heavily engaged, noting Atreides and Valor co-led a Crusoe round with Mubadala. Looking to 2027, Baker expects accelerating hyperscaler and neocloud revenue growth, converted into high-margin operating cash flow, to finance a larger share of the infrastructure buildout than before — suggesting peak reliance on external financing may be near. On public sentiment, a host argues that as OpenAI and Anthropic shares reach millions of holders (rather than maybe 50,000 people today), AI-related sentiment on platforms like X may become less polarized, and Baker praises Musk’s, Michael Dell’s, and Brad Gerstner’s practice of distributing company equity broadly as preferable to routing wealth through foundations.
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THE SIGNAL
Asked if agents let Shopify raise its take rate, Lütke said he would rather charge a lower percentage on more volume, managing to gross profit dollars, not margin; this caps agentic take-rate upside (our read).
Agentic order volume started this year from a low base, so its growth rates mean little, Lütke said, but agents increasingly drive considered, high order value project purchases, which points to AOV upside before volume does (our read).
Lütke says more Shopify stores are opening than ever, and skewing younger; Shopify is working so AIs can sign people up, with costs amortized across its billion-dollar merchants.
As a Meta board member, Lütke called Meta’s ad engine the greatest boon to small businesses ever, with Google’s slightly less so; agents threaten paid discovery unless trust-compatible formats emerge (our read).
01 Shopify vs. Amazon on agents
Lütke says he learned of Amazon blocking Muse only after Shopify had already announced it was welcoming the agent, calling the contrast cheeky but not new. He describes Amazon as representing a digitalized department store built on inventory depth rather than storytelling, while Shopify represents boutique-style entrepreneurship. He attributes Shopify’s openness to agents partly to having no advertising business to protect and to a deliberate choice never to build a traditional three-sided marketplace, since marketplaces force an operator to choose between buyers and sellers; Shopify instead sides with merchants throughout the stack. He notes Shopify has also announced partnerships with other agents, describing the company as serving small businesses wherever they sell — social channels, point-of-sale, craft fairs — not just its own storefronts.