TBPNMay 29, 202644m

Where Brad Gerstner Is Investing Billions

TL;DR

Anthropic is carrying more of the AI narrative than most people realize — Gerstner says if Anthropic hadn’t delivered breakout revenue and strong gross margins, the stock market could be down 10-15% instead of ripping higher.
Token optimization is real, but the adoption curve is still far bigger — Altimeter surveyed 300 enterprises and found that even companies actively optimizing AI spend still expect token usage growth above 50% over the next 12 months, with others expecting roughly 90% growth.
He sees a sharp split inside software, not a blanket SaaS apocalypse — companies like Snowflake, Databricks, and Qlik are “in the token flow,” while others like Salesforce face more direct competition from the models themselves.
The bigger risk than an AI bubble is America slowing data center buildout — Gerstner calls a data-center moratorium “insane,” arguing it would trigger recession risk, raise unemployment, and hand the global AI race to China.
Altimeter is still concentrated in AI and compute because public-market valuations still look cheap — he points to names like Nvidia at about 13x earnings and memory-related plays like Hynix and Micron at single-digit multiples despite massive AI-driven growth.
His most personal pitch was Invest America, not SpaceX — after four years of work, the new app gives U.S. kids $250 to $1,000 in S&P 500 exposure, and Gerstner says it could transfer $3-4 trillion of wealth over 15 years while turning non-investors into owners.

The Breakdown

Anthropic’s revenues may have saved the entire AI trade this year, and Brad Gerstner says the real bottleneck now is simple: there isn’t a “dark GPU” or unused token anywhere in the system. He lays out why Altimeter is still all-in on compute, why much of software remains in the “too hard” basket, and why his biggest non-AI bet is a new Invest America app that just hit No. 3 in the U.S. App Store.