Anthropic spends approximately $2 million in compute per employee annually, significantly outstripping the $224k average engineer salary. While the top 1% of software companies currently spend 40% of engineer salaries on AI, projections suggest market-wide AI spend could reach 230% of payroll by 2029 in bull scenarios.
HOW THIS AFFECTS YOU
●
founderYou must plan for compute costs that may eventually exceed your entire engineering payroll.
●
investorThis highlights the massive capital intensity required to compete at the frontier model level.