
Ep. 013 - AWS Margins Jump 10% While Azure and GCP Flatline (Tokenomics) | Jordan Nanos, Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros, Joey Brookhart, Crystal Huang
SemiAnalysis WeeklyShow Notes
AWS operating margins jumped 10 percentage points while Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud stayed flat. The driver: Anthropic's Claude usage routing through Bedrock, Amazon's token-as-a-service platform. Jordan Nanos (@JordanNanos), Jeremie Eliahou Ontiveros (@JeremieEO), Joey Brookhart (@SaasquatchC), and Crystal Huang (@Egg1459) break down why stabilized token margins are fundamentally richer than GPU-as-a-service for hyperscalers. The crew analyzes Anthropic's recent $65B Series H raise, Claude Opus 4.8 release, and SpaceX partnership against the backdrop of 300+ neo clouds fragmenting the traditional cloud moat.The team forecasts how AWS's workload mix advantage creates sustainable returns while competitors struggle with asset-heavy GPU service models. They examine the $22.7T TAM question, earnings-before-training dynamics, and whether the 2026 AI infrastructure beat belongs to silicon vendors or platform integrators. Subscribe for weekly deep dives into semiconductor and AI infrastructure economics.00:00 Intro: Episode 13 and the AWS margins article00:56 What is Bedrock? The three hyperscaler buckets02:33 AWS margins rising while peers lag03:33 Cloud moats collapsing and the neo cloud explosion06:32 Why stabilized token-as-a-service margins are so rich09:54 Amazon's workload mix advantage12:41 Forecasting Anthropic and the 4.8 release16:33 The SpaceX deal and the $65B Series H raise19:30 Bullish or bearish? Demand becoming supply28:55 The $22.7T TAM and does the race even matter31:59 Earnings before training and open-ended TAM36:27 The 2026 beat is basically one company40:22 Who wins long term: silicon, partnerships, integration
More from SemiAnalysis Weekly
Brad Gerstner put our 43 gigawatt forecast for 2027 on All-In, then again in his BG2 sit-down with Jensen, and called it too aggressive. The consensus counter sits near 25 GW, built on moratorium headlines and grid connection fears. Jordan Nanos (@JordanNanos) sits down with Jeremie Ontiveros (@JeremieEO) and Reyk Knuhtsen (@robotknower), who have been tracking the same capacity curve since March 2024, and it has barely moved across every model revision. So they aren't cutting it. They're raising it.
GLM 5.3 only attends to the tokens that matter. It still has to keep every one of them.
H100 rental prices went up, on a GPU that should be sliding down its depreciation curve. That curve is what lenders underwrite. Daniel Nishball (@dnishball) kicks off our new Compute Capital Markets group by following the money through Nvidia's $497B backstops, ClusterMAX as a credit signal, and whether each token is profitable. Jordan Nanos (@JordanNanos) brings the rental data. AI debt is about to pass auto loans.
Pay Anthropic $200 a month and you can pull $12,000 of Opus 5.5 tokens at API pricing. Max Kan (@maxkan) and Andrew Megalaa bought every plan, OpenAI, Meta, xAI, MiniMax, Moonshot, Z.ai, Cursor, and measured every token type to find the ceiling. The catch isn't subsidy. Anthropic still books 50 to 60% gross margins on these plans, which means the API itself is the price gouge.
Jordan (@JordanNanos) and Abhilash (@AbhilashJain17) discuss the clients SemiAnalysis consulting serves, custom projects like the inference simulator, how client work turns into research products, neocloud due diligence, and why SLAs decide who gets funded. They also discuss Feynman specs, de-specced memory, and a 20-trillion-parameter OpenAI model.