Chamath Palihapitiya told the All-In Podcast that the three major hyperscalers now control roughly 60% of all compute and have a strategic incentive to throttle OpenAI and Anthropic, a setup he called a “five-alarm fire” for the two leading frontier labs.

The Social Capital chief compared it to the collapse of Friendster, which lost the social networking race to MySpace and Facebook after it could not keep its site up.

Revenue at the frontier labs could hit a wall “not because of product quality and adoption” but because of “the Friendster effect,” he said.

Shares of Bloom Energy Corp. (NYSE:BE) have gone “absolutely straight up vertical,” Palihapitiya said, as developers rush toward on-site natural gas power that sidesteps grid queues.

Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) and CoreWeave Inc. (NASDAQ:CRWV) remain the headline picks of the compute trade, but the next leg may sit deeper in the stack.

The Mythos Theory

Co-host David Sacks offered a related read: Anthropic may have held back its rumored “Mythos” model because it could not afford to commercially serve it, preserving compute headroom for the Opus 4.7 release dropped during the taping.

That would mean Anthropic is already hitting the ceiling Palihapitiya described, and its years of lobbying against data center buildouts and aligning with doomer groups may now be backfiring as the company is forced to build its own infrastructure.

Permitting Is The New Bottleneck

A town that approved a $6 billion data center build recently saw half its board voted out overnight, Palihapitiya said, and Maine passed a bill banning new construction outright.

Roughly 40% of the nearly 100 contested data centers in the US are being cancelled, according to figures cited on the podcast, with projects currently in dispute worth around $162 billion.

Jane Street’s reported $1 billion equity check and $6 billion compute deal with a neocloud provider, Palihapitiya said, is a sign that sophisticated capital is already front-running the squeeze.

Polymarket Prices In The Next Catalyst

Polymarket traders give OpenAI roughly a 90% chance of releasing its next model, codenamed “Spud,” by the end of this month.

The contract for the best model by the end of June gives OpenAI just a 12% chance of winning, with Anthropic a heavy favorite at 55%, and Google in second with 27%.

For Palihapitiya, the trade is no longer about which lab wins. It is about whether either of them can keep the servers on long enough to find out.

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