Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO comes with a $518 billion bill

03 Oct 2026, 14:07 · The Fresno Bee

Anthropic wants retail investors to peg the company’s value at more than $2 trillion, but its IPO prospectus exposes just how pricey it could be to turn the Claude maker into one of the world’s dominant artificial intelligence companies. Anthropic said in June that it confidentially filed a draft S-1 registration statement to the SEC.

The AI startup expects to funnel $518 billion on cloud, computing, and infrastructure obligations in the coming years, according to Reuters, which reviewed Anthropic’s IPO prospectus.

That figure arrives alongside explosive growth. Anthropic produced roughly $4.6 billion in revenue during 2025, about 12 times its last year’s total.

But building the infrastructure behind the company is costing more than it is bringing in. Anthropic ended up spending $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure in the year-ago period, about three times its 2024 spending and larger than the entire 2025 revenue.

That makes Anthropic’s upcoming IPO a fascinating one. It’s a vote on whether investors will spend another $2 trillion on a big AI business.

It will also look at what Wall Street is expected to accept in capital allocation as frontier AI businesses rush to ensure they have the processing capacity to keep expanding.

Anthropic’s $42 billion loss needs some context

The big figure in Anthropic’s prospectus may end up being its loss.

The company posted a net loss of nearly $42 billion in 2025, which is astounding considering we are talking about a business bringing in $5 billion of annual revenue.

But that headline number does not tell the whole story.

Of that loss, almost $34 billion was tied to an accounting charge that reflects a rise in the projected value of financing instruments that might convert into Anthropic shares at some point. That wasn’t $34 billion in dollars spent operating Claude or buying computer power.

Anthropic’s operating loss offers a better view of the economics of the underlying firm.

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That loss widened to $8.06 billion in 2025 from $2.98 billion in 2024, even as revenue increased roughly twelvefold.

The combo illustrates both sides of the expansion at Anthropic. Revenue is growing at a staggering pace, but so are the costs of building, training, and deploying ever more sophisticated AI models.

Total operating expenses reached $12.65 billion last year. Compute and infrastructure accounted for $7.33 billion, which means these expenses represented more than half of Anthropic’s total operating spending.

That might make it one of the most crucial figures investors watch once the IPO is complete.

Anthropic’s biggest expense is also powering its growth

Compute is just not another expense line for Anthropic. It is the infrastructure the company needs to train more capable Claude models and serve an evolving and increasing customer base.

The size of that demand has surged sharply in 2026. Anthropic said in April that its annualized revenue run rate had risen to $30 billion, up from nearly $9 billion at the end of 2025. The firm also said that more than 1,000 commercial clients spent at least $1 million yearly, twice as many as two months before.

Meeting that demand requires considerably more computing power. Google and Broadcom reached deals with Anthropic to reserve about 5 gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity starting in 2027. The company says it uses a mix of Google TPUs, Amazon (AMZN) Trainium chips and Nvidia GPUs rather than focusing on a single hardware platform.

Amazon is already offering infrastructure on a giant scale. Amazon says Project Rainier, the AWS cluster used by Anthropic, includes more than 500,000 Trainium2 chips and gives Anthropic considerably more computing power than it had for earlier generations of Claude.

Anthropic has proceeded to seek more capacity abroad. Anthropic said in May that it had signed a deal with SpaceX for more than 300 megawatts of processing power and more than 220,000 Nvidia GPUs at the Colossus 1 data center. Those assets will be added to large capacity agreements with Amazon, Alphabet (GOOGL), and Microsoft (MSFT) and other infrastructure partners.

That helps explain why the $518 billion infrastructure obligation is a sore spot in the prospectus; it’s worth circling in red. Anthropic is spending heavily because greater computing capacity is connected with the ability to improve Claude, serve more customers, and contend with other frontier AI developers.

OLIVER CONTRERAS / Getty Images

Anthropic’s $2 trillion valuation raises a harder question

The prospective IPO will also signal a sharp valuation boom in a short period.

In May, Anthropic secured $65 billion in a fundraising round that valued the company at $965 billion. At the time, the company noted its growing compute footprint, including agreements with Amazon, Google and SpaceX.

A public-market valuation above $2 trillion will therefore more than double that May figure.

The argument for expansion is substantial. Anthropic’s revenue skyrocketed about 12 times in 2025, and its revenue run rate for 2026 indicates demand is still gaining momentum. But the IPO prospectus also illustrates what investors would be underwriting: an operational loss last year of $8.06 billion, expenditure on computing that outpaced annual revenue, significant customer concentration, and hundreds of billions of dollars in future infrastructure liabilities.

There is another cost to staying at the frontier. Anthropic’s own Responsible Scaling Policy says more capable models need stronger safeguards, security measures, and risk assessments as their capabilities advance, as the underlying infrastructure gets stronger.

That makes the IPO a particularly revealing test for retail investors.

Anthropic has shown that it can grow at a breakneck pace. Its prospectus now shows that maintaining that growth will require a pace that matches its revenue expansion; it’s very concerning for any potential investor in the stock.

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This story was originally published October 3, 2026 at 7:07 AM.