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AnecdoteAudio · 24:52 — 26:22

Anthropic's compute team, staffed by former Google employees, spotted a supply dislocation and locked in a huge TPU allocation before Google's own leadership grasped how much demand its AI business (and Anthropic's) would generate, forcing Google to scramble back to TSMC for more capacity once it woke up.

Dylan recounts an information-asymmetry story: Anthropic's ex-Google compute leads recognized a capacity opportunity and negotiated a massive TPU deal before Google itself foresaw its own revenue inflection, leading Google to belatedly rush back to TSMC for more wafer allocation. ✦ AI generated

Dylan Patel · Dwarkesh Podcast · 2026-03-13 · original ↗

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“Google has DeepMind, the third prominent AI lab. If this is the big bottleneck, why would they sell it rather than just giving it to DeepMind?”

The chain of events, at least from our data that we found, was in early Q3, over the course of six weeks, we saw capacity on TPUs go up by a significant amount. It went up multiple times in those six weeks. There were multiple requests. Google even had to go to TSMC and explain to them why they needed this increase in capacity because it was so sudden. A lot of that capacity increase was for selling to Anthropic.

verbatim transcript · starts at 24:52

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24:52– Nvidia secured TSMC allocation early; Google is getting squeezed

24:52– Nvidia secured TSMC allocation early; Google is getting squeezed

▦ Anthropic▦ Google▦ TSMC✳ TPU
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