"Yesterday's price is not today's price": Gavin Baker on the Anthropic S-1, GPU contango and open-weight AI

Key points

Key takeaways from the full TBPN interview with Gavin Baker, CIO and managing partner of Atreides Management (October 2026):

Anthropic's S-1 was an upside surprise. Baker reads the filing as very encouraging on profitability, cash generation and unit economics — only about $10bn burned, and roughly half the Fortune 500 has adopted Anthropic at under 0.1% of their expenses: "a wild stat".

Enterprise diffusion is earlier than feared. Annualising the reported third quarter suggests roughly $67bn ARR, yet with only ~11-12,000 customers above $100k and just 250 above $10m, adoption is far from saturated.

Concentration is natural. Baker is unfazed by a small set of companies driving AI spend — the same power law played out in social ads; a thousand-times-more-AI-obsessed cohort will spend dramatically more than the long tail.

Open-weight is outgrowing the leaders. Fireworks, Base10, Together, Modal and Cognition are scaling faster than OpenAI and Anthropic — and Atreides led Fireworks' last round, which was hard to price because revenue was compounding daily.

Compute is in contango. The spot market for GPUs has risen every day through October; Silicon Data's Carmen Lee said at GTC the forward curve now prices clusters higher, and Atreides portfolio companies see compute costs keep climbing even into 2027 despite announced supply.

Financing is concentrating capacity in competent operators. Prepayments favour firms that can actually stand up clusters — CoreWeave, Crusoe, Nebius, xAI and hyperscalers — while CoreWeave's locked-in below-market long-term contracts are why it is getting hammered.

DSX Pod matters. Nvidia's pre-assembled seven-rack pod at GTC Berlin cuts the three-to-six-month energisation lag, taking working capital out of the build-out.

GroqBot is the most impactful AI product for him. Baker says xAI's agent — with Cursor's go-to-market and design team behind it — is transformative for information flow in investing, though he notes his human assistant Susan still holds the executive-assistant job.

Read more: TBPN on YouTube