# AI customers may earn multiples of their model spend

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/ai-customers-may-earn-multiples-of-their-model-spend/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [David Friedberg](https://realalpha.app/people/david-friedberg/) (Host) · CEO, Ohalo · Founded The Climate Corporation, sold to Monsanto for about $1.1B in 2013.
- Host: [Chamath Palihapitiya](https://realalpha.app/people/chamath-palihapitiya/) · Founder & CEO, Social Capital · Led Facebook's growth team; his firm backed Slack and AI chipmaker Groq.
- Host: [Jason Calacanis](https://realalpha.app/people/jason-calacanis/) · Founder & CEO, LAUNCH · Early Uber angel; sold Weblogs Inc. to AOL; hosts This Week in Startups.
- Host: [David Sacks](https://realalpha.app/people/david-sacks/) · Co-founder & partner, Craft Ventures · PayPal's first COO, founded Yammer; White House AI & crypto czar 2025–26.
- Show: All-In
- Episode: [Anthropic S-1 Shocker, Greatest Business Ever? Google’s $500B Wipeout, Midterm Predictions](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/), Oct 30, 2026
- Moment: 11:15 to 15:27 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/ai-customers-may-earn-multiples-of-their-model-spend/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/?t=675

## Quote

> “the customers are making call it on the order of **two to 10 times the money** they're spending”
> — [David Friedberg](https://realalpha.app/people/david-friedberg/) at [14:00](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/?t=840) · All-In

## Takeaways

1. Anthropic had 11,900 customers spending at least $100K by September.
2. Friedberg estimates customers earn two to ten times their AI spend.
3. He says that return estimate is an assumption, not a reported figure.

## About this segment

David Friedberg estimates customers may get two to ten dollars of value per AI dollar, then traces how margins stack from chips to model providers. He flags that the customer-return estimate is an assumption, but sees it as evidence of productivity.

From “Anthropic S-1 Shocker, Greatest Business Ever? Google’s $500B Wipeout, Midterm Predictions”, Oct 30, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[11:18](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/?t=678) That's kind of perhaps revealed a little bit in this. So in the S1, Anthropic shows how many customers they have that are spending 100K or more. If we take a look at the image here, it's a pretty remarkable ramp in customers spending 100K or more, 200 customers in 2024, end of year, 1,500 end of 2025, and at the end of September, 11,900 customers spending 100k or more so i asked the question you know how many customers are there for which a hundred thousand dollar annual spend is less than one percent of their total annual spend and the answer is in the u.s it's about 200 to 300 thousand businesses globally it's a bit over a million so you know if you just say hey look anthropics customers that could spend 100k or more and have it be less than one percent of their total spend the addressable customer base is about a million customers so they're only at

[12:19](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/?t=739) call it one percent of total customer penetration potential now the question is is there real money to be made here. So I took a look at the kind of AI value stack to try and identify who's making money where. And it turns out everyone's making money. So and I think we've talked about this quite a bit. And I know Jamal's got some views on this as it relates to the neoclouds. What is a shard? Is this like AI output? Or that or I had I had Claude make this for me as an image.

[12:47](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/?t=767) Cool. Or I should just say my analyst made this for me in my shop. You're a bot. And so, you know, I basically said, like, start with NVIDIA. How much does NVIDIA spend to make the chips? And then how much do they sell the chips for? So for every dollar of COGS, every dollar that NVIDIA spends, that turns into $4 of revenue for NVIDIA, 75% margin. And then that gets sold to SpaceX, and then SpaceX turns around, and they're making, you know, an 83% margin on that chip spend because they're kind of looking at a five-year depreciation.

[13:20](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/?t=800) So they spent $10 billion on Colossus I, five-year life, $2 billion a year depreciation. And so that's kind of the cost per year, but then they're making $1.25 billion a month on Colossus. And then Anthropic is showing in this S1, pretty remarkably to Sachs' point, that they're making about 85% incremental gross margin on every incremental dollar coming in. It's obviously a baseline of compute spend, but 85% is kind of the incremental gross margin.

[13:50](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/?t=830) So at the end of the day, a dollar that NVIDIA spends turns into $18 that Anthropic is making selling to customers. And the question is, are customers making money? So we're seeing the customer ramp as it is and the spend ramp as it is. And the customers are making call it on the order of two to 10 times the money they're spending because otherwise, there would be probably a retention issue and a decline in spend.

[14:13](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/?t=853) Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's early days of exuberance and people are losing money and we could debate that point a bit. But generally speaking, if AI is delivering value to the customers, I think this shows that there really is true productivity arising from AI that across the whole value chain, there is such margin to be had, there's so much value being created all the way through to the customers.

[14:35](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/?t=875) And we're only 1% or Anthropic is only 1% penetrated on their customer potential, and probably less than 10% of the spend potential per customer. That this really is what I think Eric Schmidt a long time ago in the early days of Google used to say Google's total addressable market is global commerce. And I think for the first time ever, we're seeing a business actually potentially starting to realize that theory that if you can create enough productivity gain for your customers, that your TAM is commerce. And it really highlights that maybe, you know, we're almost growing the equivalency of the human working population by 100x or 1000x or a million x with this technology stack.

[15:16](https://realalpha.app/v/p1Dy4e4ff0s/?t=916) So I just thought, like, to me, it was so striking how early we are, but also how incredibly profitable everyone is, which indicates there's quite a bit of productivity being produced across the whole value stack.