r/investing
Anthropic is about to IPO at ~$1 trillion. Has anyone looked at the ESG liability?
Author questions if the market underprices Anthropic's IPO by ignoring massive ESG liabilities and AI data center costs.
- Impressive revenue growth and compute cost metrics.
- AI data centers cause massive environmental damage, currently an unpaid externality.
- Post-IPO regulatory scrutiny (SEC, CA SB 253) will turn hidden environmental costs into material line items.
- Analyst coverage currently fails to price in these impending ESG liabilities.
Everyone’s talking about revenue growth and compute costs. Fair enough, the numbers are impressive.
But data centers cost the US economy $25 billion last year in environmental damage, $3.7 billion of that directly from AI. Right now that’s an externality society pays it, not the companies.
Once Anthropic goes public, that changes. SEC disclosure requirements, California’s SB 253, investor scrutiny. Stuff that was never visible as a private company is suddenly a line item.
No one in the analyst coverage seems to be pricing this in. Is that because it’s genuinely immaterial at this scale, or is it just not on anyone’s radar yet?
Curious what people here think.
ESG sailed a while ago.
ESG is dead
Maybe ESG could be good compost material
No, it's toxic. Better to incinerate and have the fumes blow toward the greens.
RIP
America is generally happy to let corporations destroy the environment as long as fat morons in Iowa can still watch right wing propaganda on the tv
Because the fat morons in Iowa see global warming mean a warmer January, while coastal liberals complain about their beach houses getting flooded.
I've been hearing this take for decades now. It's almost like a comedy act now. It's never going to happen.
Lol ESG, shit has been dead for a while
ESG? Lol
It is an unknown cost, and that goes both ways.
The AI race is an arms race. We MUST spend whatever we can to win it, otherwise we will be dominated by the Chinese, and become some class lower than them, where we make resources and they draw upon them at will.
Superintelligence may or may not solve our environmental problems. Another bet we are making is that it will solve our environmental problems. And it doesn’t much matter. If you think about it, all the data points to us already losing the environment, with much of the planet slowly becoming uninhabitable over time. All the climate targets are to prevent us from crossing this line (and not make the environment better per se), and we’ve already crossed it. So if we make it go faster, we may be doing everyone a favor: nothing motivates people more than an emergency
A climate change accelerationist- truly a regarded take
Still in the early stages yet. The technology always improves, and that always means it will become more efficient in the future, that's how these things work.
Yeah sure, we’ll figure it out later. That’s been a popular response to climate change for the past 50 years.
Seems to me that if we never start the hard work, we won’t seek efficiencies to make it easier. More likely, we’ll find more efficient methods of fracking or deep sea oil drilling.
I love ESG, WMD, BLT etc.
😂
Yikes man. There are close to 8 billion people out there not ready for climate change.
No one cares about ESG unless your in maybe 5 states
Ironically, Texas is way outpacing California on clean energy. Way less red tape.
Oh I know. I work in the energy sector. I live in the south. The realities of economics play a huge factor in where this stuff gets built. The south is pretty ripe for it
There’s the entire revenue model to think about as Uber blew through their entire AI budget quicker than expected .. with throttling as a result. All these queries will cost money in terms of paying the infrastructure, the electric bills, etc.. and then these costs can be quantified in terms of environmental impact. Still trying to figure out exactly what the rate is? How much compute will be used? etc. before environmental is assessed.
The S&P 500 isn’t letting them in without “seasoning”
the only thing I am wondering is where the $250,000,000,000 is going to come from to buy
SPCX, Openai, and Anthropic
The ESG liability angle is smart, but you're early. The market is still in 'growth at all costs' mode for AI. SB 253 and SEC disclosure requirements are real, but enforcement is years away. By the time anyone cares about Anthropic's environmental damage, the stock will have already tripled or crashed on other factors. If you're long-term, it's a risk to monitor. If you're trading the IPO pop, nobody's looking at this yet.
Seems like the data center would be responsible for the utilities and the wastes for the most part. DOn't think this impact anthropic nearly as much as they seem to be renting a lot of data center space?
Uh all of reddit could pretty much run on like 5 racks of 2010 era hardware, this site isn't the thing destroying the environment
Reddit has $34 billion market cap, buddy.
🙄
Uh ok so how many data centers per dollar of stock price increase do they need to build
Go back to marketing or whatever is you must do lol