Dario Amodei, co-founder and CEO of Anthropic, attends the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi, India on Thursday, February 19, 2026.
Prakash Singh | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said the company is planning for 10x growth. But revenue and usage in the first quarter increased 80x on an annualized basis, which explains why it’s so difficult to keep up with demand, he says.
“That’s why we’re having trouble with computing,” Amodei said Wednesday at the company’s developer conference in San Francisco. Amodei added that the company is working to provide “more” capacity as soon as possible and will “get that compute into our customers as soon as possible.”
Amodei’s comments came hours after Anthropic announced a deal with Elon Musk’s SpaceX to use all the computing power at the company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. As part of the deal, Anthropic will have access to more than 300 megawatts of capacity. SpaceX now owns a rival artificial intelligence laboratory, xAI, known as SpaceXAI.
Anthropic’s historic growth has been driven by the popularity of its Claude AI model, which has seen significant explosive growth since last year’s launch of Claude Code, which took the software development world by storm. As previously reported by CNBC, the company is currently in talks with investors to raise money at a valuation of $900 billion, which would make it a more valuable company than OpenAI.
“Software engineers are the people who can introduce new technology the fastest,” Amodei said on stage. “This is a preview of how things will work across the economy and how it will be transformed by AI.”
Anthropic said last month that demand for Claude has put an “inevitable strain on our infrastructure,” impacting “reliability and performance” for users, especially during peak times. The company has signed several computing deals in recent weeks, including a multibillion-dollar deal with Amazon.
Meanwhile, Anthropic has been navigating a contentious relationship with the U.S. government and the Department of Defense, which in March declared it exposed to supply chain risks and blacklisted it from working with the military. As this fight makes its way through the legal system, Anthropic’s popularity only grows.
Amodei told the audience that the current level of growth was “absolutely insane” and “too difficult to handle” and that he hoped for a “more normal” expansion.
—CNBC’s Ashley Capoot contributed to this report.
WATCH: Anthropic’s Dario Amodei and JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon discuss the AI boom and its impact on jobs
