Anthropic / 28 September 2026

Anthropic IPO papers reveal $518 billion compute plan

Anthropic's confidential IPO prospectus, reviewed by Reuters and first described on 28 September, sets out at least $518 billion of cloud, compute and infrastructure spending over the coming decade. About four-fifths of the amount is non-cancelable or payable regardless of use, according to a further Reuters examination of the document. The Claude developer generated nearly $4.6 billion in 2025 revenue, about 12 times the prior year, but lost more than $8 billion from operations and spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure. Its nearly $42 billion net loss includes a roughly $34 billion non-cash charge linked to financing value. The figures make the proposed public offering a judgment on whether extraordinary future demand can earn a return on capacity committed years in advance.

The obligations are spread across six partners, Reuters reported. They include at least $111.1 billion with Google, $110 billion with Amazon and $31.4 billion with Microsoft under long-term infrastructure service arrangements, plus about $161.2 billion of largely non-cancelable Broadcom-related equipment leases. At the end of 2025 Anthropic had $54.6 billion of non-cancelable hosting and computing commitments; by early 2026, longer-term commitments exceeded $417 billion and covered 3.5 gigawatts of dedicated capacity. Some spending in the $518 billion plan has a different degree of flexibility, so the headline total should be read alongside its contract terms. Anthropic told investors that future growth could be ‘limited principally by the availability of compute,’ explaining why it secured capacity early.

The company is also moving beyond a cloud-only purchasing model toward dedicated data centers and directly leased chips. Its prospectus describes a potential agreement for as much as $84.5 billion of Nvidia-based capacity from xAI through 2029 that can largely be canceled on 90 days' notice, a different risk profile from the fixed cloud and lease obligations. AMD separately committed to buy up to $5 billion of Anthropic equity and to supply capacity expected to exceed $20 billion, Reuters reported. These transactions diversify suppliers and hardware choices but also create a complicated set of financing, supply and competitive relationships. The prospective IPO could bring in fresh equity, although the offering size, price and final timing have not been announced publicly.

The income statement shows both demand and strain. Revenue rose from about $400 million in 2024 to $4.6 billion in 2025, while the operating loss widened from roughly $3 billion to $8.06 billion. Compute and infrastructure represented more than half of $12.65 billion in total operating expense last year. Anthropic reported $20.28 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments at year-end 2025. These historical numbers cannot alone establish whether later cohorts of customers are profitable, but they show the scale of funding required before much of the newly committed capacity can generate revenue. The $34 billion valuation-linked accounting charge explains why the net loss is a poor shorthand for operating cash burn.

Reuters says a listing could value Anthropic at more than $2 trillion, over twice the estimated $965 billion valuation in May. The company declined comment on the confidential filing and has not published a public SEC prospectus. Investors will have to assess not only model demand but utilization and the terms under which capacity arrives. A contracted gigawatt or GPU-hour can be an advantage if demand is constrained by supply; the same obligation absorbs cash if customer usage or prices fall below plan. The prospectus's warning about model behavior and the company's safety spending add another possible brake on the conversion of compute into billable usage. Its enormous commitments make the pace of reliable product release an economic variable.