Tomasz Tunguz estimates that short-term GPU rental prices rose from about $3 to $12–$13 per hour over six months, increasing Anthropic’s blended cost per GPU-equivalent hour from $3.10 to $5.65, within a $3.45–$8.29 confidence band. His analysis combines Anthropic’s updated Form S-1/A, public capacity disclosures and the Ornn B300 Compute Price Index. Anthropic and other providers are seeking multi-year accelerator contracts at roughly $2–$4 per hour and using the short-term burst market when long-term capacity is exhausted. Tunguz also reports that Anthropic spent $5.0 billion on short-term compute in the third quarter of 2026, equal to 51% of its $9.86 billion quarterly compute bill; the company moved from a $974 million GAAP operating profit in the second quarter to a $567 million operating loss in the third. He cites 40%–50% of data-center projects being delayed and billions of dollars in GPUs awaiting power. The report attributes the stated responses—Opus 5.5’s reported 40% lower cost per task, tighter subscription allowances and multi-year enterprise commitments—to labs confronting the cost increase.