OpenAI, Anthropic, and major cloud providers are racing to outbid each other with free compute credits to pull startups into their ecosystems. Some individual offers top $3 million. At Y Combinator alone, OpenAI and Anthropic could hand out up to $800 million in credits per year combined. The discount war comes at a time when both companies need to improve their margins ahead of upcoming IPOs.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and major cloud providers are racing to outbid each other with free compute credits to pull startups into their ecosystems. Some individual offers top $3…

SpaceX's $1.25 billion monthly Anthropic compute deal could add $15 billion in annual AI revenue to xAI, reshaping tech and crypto compute market dynamics.