Anthropic CEO personally confirms Q1 growth of 80x: explaining why it had to secure all of SpaceX’s computing power

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said on May 6 at the Code with Claude developer conference in San Francisco that the company originally planned annualized revenue growth of 10 times in Q1, but the actual result was 80 times. CNBC, citing Amodei’s exact words, wrote: “That’s why we’re facing compute difficulties,” and said the current growth rate is “just crazy,” “too hard to deal with,” and that it hopes to get back to a “more normal” expansion pace. The statement came hours after the company announced a compute partnership with SpaceX on the same day, providing a direct commercial backdrop for “why you need all the compute of Colossus 1.”

Planned 10x, actual 80x: Anthropic claims revenue growth outpaced expectations

What Amodei emphasized at the meeting was that both “annualized revenue and usage” grew 80 times. His original expectation of 10 times was already a highly aggressive expansion curve, and the actual figures were a further order of magnitude beyond expectations. Anthropic did not disclose specific dollar amounts in the talk, and Amodei also did not break down which product lines drove the growth (Claude API, Claude Code, Claude Pro/Max subscriptions, enterprise contracts, etc.).

This stance is essentially a counter-note to Amodei’s more cautious spending narrative from the past six months. He had warned in February that if AI growth forecasts deviated from the year ahead, the company would go bankrupt; now he is admitting a deviation in the other direction—growth is faster than expected.

“Crazy, too hard to handle”: Amodei’s unease about the growth pace

Amodei’s descriptions of the growth pace at the meeting:

“Just crazy”

“Too hard to handle”

“Hoping to get back to a more normal expansion cadence”

These three lines come from the CEO himself, using direct language and not marketing phrasing. Over the past year, Anthropic has seen Claude Code and Claude API developer adoption and demand far exceed expectations; this stance is the first time company leadership has concretely quantified the runaway part with a specific multiple.

Amodei also added that Anthropic is “doing everything it can to provide more compute as quickly as possible,” and “will pass this compute to users as soon as possible”—hinting that the user-facing perceived limits will be eased, and that new compute will be deployed and rolled out in tandem.

A commercial footnote to the SpaceX partnership announced the same day

Amodei’s 80x claim directly serves as a companion footnote to the SpaceX compute partnership announced the same day—Anthropic secured all the compute of the Colossus 1 data center (300+ MW, 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs), with plans to have it fully online within a month. The CEO publicly acknowledged “growth is too fast and there isn’t enough compute,” and that it was happening alongside landing an entire large existing data center’s compute, all occurring on the same day.

For now, the 80x figure is a spoken statement by the CEO, and Anthropic has not released earnings report numbers to corroborate it. When the next formal financial disclosure arrives, the multiple can be checked against the evidence.

This article, “Anthropic CEO admits in his own words that Q1 growth was 80x: explains why it had to secure all of SpaceX’s compute,” first appeared on Chain News ABMedia.