On a recent episode of The Pomp Podcast, investor Jordi Visser relayed an admission from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that reframes how to think about AI infrastructure demand. Anthropic, the maker of the Claude assistant, watched AI demand blow past every internal scenario they had modeled: “We planned our business for 2 or 3x [growth], and then we went all the way out and said the outlier would be if we could 10x our business. And he goes, the problem is that we didn’t 10x, we 80x’d the business.”
The Physical Infrastructure Constraint
Visser’s takeaway cuts directly into the core challenge facing investors in AI right now. If the companies building frontier AI systems underestimated demand by that magnitude, then the constraint becomes physical infrastructure. More users require more compute, more data centers, and ultimately more power capacity.
In AI, megawatts are becoming the equivalent of restaurant seats. Host Anthony Pompliano offered a restaurant analogy: “If you create a restaurant and all of a sudden you’ve got a line out the door, well, you need more seats.” The seats, in this case, are megawatts.
Where the Capital Is Flowing: Hut 8
Visser’s cleanest concrete example was Hut 8 (NASDAQ:HUT), the former bitcoin miner that secured a huge, almost $10 billion deal for one of its development sites. This is a 15-year, $7.0 billion lease with Fluidstack for 245 MW of IT capacity at Hut 8’s River Bend campus in Louisiana, financially backstopped by Google, with a right of first offer for up to an additional 1,000 MW at future phases. Initial delivery is targeted for Q2 2027.
Hut 8 now describes itself as a power-first AI infrastructure platform with an 8,500 MW development pipeline and has carved out its legacy ASIC mining into a separately listed American Bitcoin Corp. Hut 8 is up 114.32% year-to-date, and 594.85% over the trailing year, with a market cap near $11.09 billion. Reddit’s wallstreetbets sentiment score hit 74 (Bullish) following the lease announcement.
The Bigger Signal
Visser flagged a “fracturing of attention and capital” as bitcoin miners and high-performance manufacturing sites convert or co-locate data centers to subsidize core operations. He was careful to note this is “not as egregious as everyone changed their name to blockchain back 5, 6 years ago.” The Hut 8 deal has real counterparties, real megawatts, and real lease economics. For investors, the practical question is which power-rich platforms can convert pipeline into delivered capacity before the demand curve bends again.
Top Gaining Stocks
Top Losing Stocks