Sam Altman's compute bet is paying off, but the bill is coming Sam Altman and Dario Amodei actively not holding hands. Ludovic MARIN / AFP via Getty Images Sam Altman once said, "compute is destiny," and the AI market this year may be proving him right. Rival Anthropic has been signing its own big AI compute deals recently. How these deals will be paid for is still unclear. Big AI changes make this even harder to predict. In early December, Anthropic's CEO, Dario Amodei, suggested that some rivals were overextending themselves in AI compute. "There are some players who are YOLOing ," Amodei said, hinting that rival OpenAI had signed too many AI compute deals and might struggle to afford them. But as demand surges and systems strain, the balance is shifting. OpenAI's aggressive push to lock in capacity is starting to look more pragmatic, while Anthropic faces outages and growing pains of its own, a reminder that in the AI race, having enough compute may matter just as much as building better models.…