Anthropic's Prospectus Shows a $518 Billion Compute Bill

For two months the Anthropic IPO story has been about a valuation without a balance sheet. Investors talked about $2 trillion; the company said nothing. On September 28, Reuters published what it described as Anthropic's IPO prospectus, and the books finally have numbers in them. The one that will shape the debate is not revenue. It is $518 billion, the amount Anthropic has committed to spend on cloud, compute and infrastructure in the coming years.

A caveat first. This is not a public filing. Anthropic submitted its registration confidentially, on June 1 according to Yahoo Finance's reporting, and as of this week no S-1 has appeared on the SEC's EDGAR system. Reuters, followed by CNBC, TechCrunch and others, reported on a prospectus document it reviewed. Anthropic has not published or confirmed it. Final audited figures, offering terms and the share count will only be fixed when a public S-1 lands.

Revenue that grew twelvefold, and costs that grew faster

Per Reuters, Anthropic's revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion. Several outlets reading the same document put the figure at about $4.59 billion, against roughly $386 million the year before. The growth has not slowed. TechCrunch reported second-quarter 2026 revenue of $11.5 billion, which is about two and a half times all of 2025 in a single quarter, and said the company is on track for a second straight quarter of operating profit on an adjusted basis.

The cost side moved just as fast. Anthropic's operating loss widened to more than $8 billion in 2025 from $2.98 billion in 2024, according to The Next Web's summary of the Reuters report. Operating expenses were about $12.65 billion, and compute and infrastructure alone accounted for $7.33 billion of that, triple the prior year and more than half of total operating costs.

The net loss looks worse: about $42 billion. Roughly $34 billion of it, per Reuters, is a non-cash accounting charge tied to financing instruments that could convert into shares. That charge does not burn cash, but it points to dilution that public shareholders will inherit. Anthropic ended 2025 with $20.28 billion in cash, equivalents and short-term investments, according to The Next Web.

The $518 billion line item

The commitments are where the prospectus stops looking like a fast-growing software company and starts looking like a utility under construction. Per reporting from The Next Web and Yahoo Finance, the $518 billion spans six partners, generally over seven to ten years:

Google accounts for $111.1 billion. Amazon accounts for $110 billion. Microsoft accounts for $31.4 billion. The largest single block, about $161.2 billion, is largely non-cancellable equipment lease obligations tied to Broadcom. Capacity through xAI and Nvidia runs up to $84.5 billion but is mostly cancellable on 90 days' notice, and AMD appears through a $5 billion stock purchase and more than $20 billion in computing capacity.

Roughly 80% of the total is owed whether or not Anthropic uses the compute, according to those reports. Yahoo Finance did the division: for every dollar Anthropic earned in 2025, it has committed roughly $113 to future infrastructure. Against the second-quarter run rate the ratio is far less alarming, which is the bet. Anthropic is underwriting a decade of capacity on the assumption that revenue keeps compounding at something close to its current pace.

Two customers, a quarter of revenue

The disclosure most likely to move pricing conversations is buried in the risk factors. Per Reuters, nearly a quarter of Anthropic's 2025 revenue came from two customers, and the company warned that many of its largest clients are not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending. Reuters did not name them.

That is a real concentration risk for a company carrying hundreds of billions in fixed obligations. It also reframes the commitment table. Anthropic's largest infrastructure suppliers include companies that are also distributors of its models, which means some of the same relationships sit on both sides of the ledger. Until the public filing names the two customers, investors will be guessing at how intertwined those flows are.

A risk section unlike any other

The prospectus reportedly runs 261 pages, with about 80 devoted to risk factors against 48 on operations, per Yahoo Finance. TechCrunch reported that the risk section describes model behaviors including attempts to "resist shutdown," to "conceal or manipulate information," and conduct "resembling blackmail," and that it references catastrophic or existential risk to humanity. No other company has had to explain those risks to retail investors in an offering document.

Governance is built to survive the listing. According to Yahoo Finance, a Founder LLC structure gives the seven co-founders 50.1% of voting power through Class F shares, a control that persists until two or fewer founders remain. The co-founders have pledged 80% of their equity to charity, and the Long-Term Benefit Trust, whose members include former Fed Chair Ben Bernanke, remains in place.

What the numbers do to the $2 trillion

Reuters reported that Anthropic is targeting a valuation above $2 trillion, roughly double the $965 billion it was valued at in May, with a listing expected after the November midterm elections. Before this week, that figure rested on investor enthusiasm. Now it rests on a quarterly run rate near $46 billion annualized, a cash cushion of about $20 billion, and a fixed infrastructure bill that runs to half a trillion.

Those three numbers will define the roadshow. Bulls will point to the second quarter and the move toward operating profit. Skeptics will point to the commitments, the customer concentration and the $34 billion charge. The public S-1 will settle the details, but the shape of the argument is already set.