The English-speaking community recently revisited the first dinner between Jensen Huang and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in May 2022: Tom Brown, head of computing, presented a table claiming that Google TPU was more cost-effective than NVIDIA chips at the same dollar amount, prompting Huang to call him a "bean counter" and threaten to skip the dinner.

The dinner ultimately took place. During the event, Huang repeatedly stated that NVIDIA aims to build the world's largest data center; Amodei muttered that Huang's behavior resembled that of Trump. Brown, who came from OpenAI's large training background, later handled Anthropic's computing procurement.

Subsequently, Anthropic adopted a multi-chip approach, utilizing Google TPU, Amazon Trainium, and NVIDIA GPU in parallel. Public agreements included up to approximately 1 million TPUs and over 1 gigawatt capacity, with some leased through Google Cloud and others sold as complete systems via Broadcom.

NVIDIA announced an investment of up to $10 billion in Anthropic, linked to up to approximately 1 gigawatt of the Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems; Microsoft also has parallel funding arrangements. The timeline fell within weeks to months after the public announcement of the TPU deal, creating a structure of "buy Google silicon first, then accept NVIDIA's investment".

In Silicon Valley, a "bean counter" refers to a procurement officer who only calculates unit dollar performance without securing ecosystem lock-in. Huang's counterpoint focused on cluster scale, networking, and software stack, rather than single-card efficiency metrics. Three years later, both sides included each other in their capital expenditures.

In terms of market mechanisms, what is sold is alternative silicon for training and inference, and what is bought is the uninterrupted capacity of model companies. Funds flow from Anthropic's cloud and self-built capital expenditures to TPU racks, GPU clusters, and equity investments; beneficiaries are suppliers who can simultaneously profit from leasing and complete system sales, while pressured are chip manufacturers trying to lock in customers with a single efficiency metric. The event was driven by the resurfacing of old dinner details, compounded by the established million-chip agreements.

Source: Public Information