Capital & Compute

Anthropic IPO Prospectus: How Much It Spends on Compute

Anthropic's IPO prospectus shows $7.33B spent on compute in 2025 and $518B in obligations ahead, 113 times its revenue. Here is who it is owed to.

· ai· economics· infrastructure· By Capital & Compute
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Anthropic spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure in 2025 and has $518 billion of cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations ahead of it, according to its IPO prospectus as reported by Reuters on 28 September 2026. That obligation is 113 times the company’s 2025 revenue of nearly $4.6 billion, and 26 times the $20.28 billion of cash it held at year end.

Most coverage stopped at the headline numbers. This page does the arithmetic on them. It separates the cash loss from the accounting charge, sets the $518 billion against every other figure in the filing, and checks which parts of that total each counterparty has disclosed in its own filings. One caveat covers the whole page: the prospectus behind this week’s “IPO filing” headlines is the confidential one Reuters reviewed, not a public filing. Every prospectus figure below comes from Reuters’ reports of 28 and 29 September.

Has Anthropic filed for its IPO?

Yes, confidentially. Anthropic submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC on 1 June 2026. The prospectus Reuters reviewed runs 261 pages in its main body, about 80 of them risk factors. As of 29 September no public S-1 from Anthropic, PBC is on EDGAR, and no price range, share count or date is set.

Two Reuters exclusives in two days drove the headlines. The 28 September report covered the financials. The 29 September report covered the risk factors: about 80 pages warning that advanced AI could pose “catastrophic or existential risks to humanity” and that models can show “self-preserving behaviors”, against 48 pages describing the business. SpaceX, for comparison, used about 38 of 277 pages on risk. A search of EDGAR’s company index and full-text search on 29 September found only third-party SPV funds named after Anthropic, no registration statement from the company itself. The public S-1 is the next event to watch, because it is where these numbers become checkable.

How much did Anthropic spend on compute in 2025?

Anthropic spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure in 2025, per its prospectus as reported by Reuters. That is roughly three times the 2024 figure and more than half of its $12.65 billion in total operating expenses. It also exceeded revenue: compute alone cost about 1.6 times the nearly $4.6 billion Anthropic brought in.

$7.33B
2025 compute spend
about 3x 2024
58%
Share of operating costs
of $12.65B opex
1.6x
Compute vs revenue
$7.33B vs $4.6B
$518B
Obligations ahead
in coming years

Working back from Reuters’ multiples, 2024 compute spend comes out at roughly $2.4 billion and 2024 revenue at roughly $0.38 billion. Those are approximations, because “threefold” and “12-fold” are rounded. The direction is the point. Revenue grew four times faster than compute spend, so compute fell from several times revenue in 2024 to about 1.6 times revenue in 2025. That is the improvement Anthropic will ask public investors to extrapolate.

The comparison also shows how quickly the company has scaled since December. Anthropic said its run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion in May 2026, when it raised its Series H, and CNBC reported a $65 billion run-rate for July, after Bloomberg first reported it. The prospectus numbers describe a much smaller company than the one about to list.

What is the $518 billion in compute obligations?

Reuters’ wording is “plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years”. Two words in that sentence carry most of the meaning. “Obligations” means contracted or committed spending, the kind a prospectus has to disclose because it binds future cash flow. “Years” is plural. Several aggregator pages quote it as “in the coming year”, which would mean an annual spend 70 times the 2025 figure. The Reuters text does not say that.

The contracts behind the figure run on very different clocks. The AWS commitment runs ten years, the SpaceX rental ends in May 2029, and the TeraWulf lease runs twenty years. So $518 billion is a multi-year backlog, not a budget for 2027. Reuters does not give the schedule. The public S-1 should, in its contractual-obligations table, and that table will be the first thing to read when it lands.

Who is the $518 billion owed to?

The prospectus, as reported, does not name the counterparties. The provider split that circulates online (AWS $100 billion, Google $200 billion, Lambda and Nscale $80 billion, Fluidstack $50 billion, Azure $30 billion) was put together by outlets summing earlier deal reports, and its five buckets add up to $460 billion, not $518 billion. The table below lists each deal only at the figure its own primary source discloses.

Counterparty Disclosed amount Term Disclosed by
Google Cloud $200B (reported) 5 years The Information, May 2026; not confirmed by either company
Amazon (AWS) More than $100B 10 years Anthropic, April 2026 and Amazon’s Q2 2026 10-Q
SpaceX Colossus $1.25B a month (about $45B maximum, derived) To May 2029 SpaceX prospectus (424B4), June 2026
Nscale Up to about $44.6B Four agreements Nscale S-1, September 2026
Lambda $35B (reported) 6 years Bloomberg, August 2026, crediting the Wall Street Journal
Microsoft Azure $30B Not stated Anthropic, November 2025
TeraWulf About $19B 20-year lease TeraWulf 8-K, July 2026
Akamai About $11.6B, plus up to $9B more 7 years Akamai 8-K, September 2026
Fluidstack $50B “investment” Sites through 2026 Anthropic, November 2025
CoreWeave Not disclosed Multi-year CoreWeave, April 2026

The named deals with a dollar figure add up to about $485 billion without Fluidstack, or about $535 billion with it. Either way they land near $518 billion, which makes it plausible that the prospectus total is mostly these contracts. They still cannot be reconciled to the line, for three reasons:

  • Google is the biggest piece and the least confirmed. The $200 billion figure is about 39% of the total and comes from one outlet. Anthropic’s own posts describe the Google relationship only as up to one million TPUs worth “tens of billions of dollars” (October 2025) and “multiple gigawatts” of TPU capacity from 2027 (April 2026). Broadcom’s own 8-K puts its share at about 3.5 gigawatts, “dependent on Anthropic’s continued commercial success”.
  • Fluidstack may be counted twice. Anthropic framed the $50 billion as its own investment in data centers, not as a purchase contract, and the April Google and Broadcom post describes itself as an expansion of that commitment.
  • Some of it can be cancelled. SpaceX’s prospectus gives either party a 90-day exit after the first three months. The Nscale filing says the financing for its build is not yet secured. A $45 billion ceiling on a contract with a 90-day exit is a different kind of obligation from a ten-year AWS commitment.

The SpaceX deal and how Colossus is rented to rivals are covered in more detail in SpaceX’s AI infrastructure data centers. The off-balance-sheet chip-lease structure Anthropic also uses, a $35 billion Apollo and Blackstone vehicle, is covered in how AI data centers get financed.

Why did Anthropic lose $42 billion?

Most of the $42 billion loss is not spending. Reuters reports that the net loss “included a roughly $34 billion accounting charge that reflected an increase in the estimated value of financing that could eventually turn into Anthropic shares”. When a company’s valuation climbs from hundreds of billions to nearly a trillion dollars in a year, instruments that convert into its stock are revalued upward, and that gain for the holders is booked as a loss for the company. The cash story is the operating loss: just over $8 billion, which is about what $12.65 billion of expenses minus $4.6 billion of revenue gives.

Anthropic 2025: operating costs to net lossOperating expenses of $12.65 billion, less revenue of $4.6 billion, leave an operating loss of about $8.05 billion. A roughly $34 billion non-cash financing charge takes the net loss to about $42 billion.$0B$10B$20B$30B$40B$50BOperating expensescompute $7.33B of it$12.65BLess revenue-$4.6BOperating lossthe cash-relevant loss$8.05BFinancing revaluationnon-cash accounting charge+$34BNet loss$42B
Anthropic 2025: operating costs to net loss
StepChangeRunning total
Operating expenses (compute $7.33B of it)$12.65B$12.65B
Less revenue-$4.6B$12.65B
Operating loss (the cash-relevant loss)$8.05B$8.05B
Financing revaluation (non-cash accounting charge)+$34B$42.05B
Net loss$42B$42B
From operating costs to the $42 billion net loss, 2025. The operating loss is derived as total operating expenses minus revenue and matches Reuters' 'more than $8 billion'. The accounting charge and the net loss are rounded as Reuters reported them, so the bars reconcile only approximately.Source: Capital & Compute calculation from Reuters reporting on the Anthropic prospectus, 28 September 2026

The split matters for anyone comparing Anthropic with OpenAI or with SpaceX, the benchmark IPO this year. A $42 billion loss sounds like an existential burn rate. An $8 billion operating loss on $4.6 billion of revenue, in a year when the run-rate then climbed to $65 billion by July, is a different story. The loss that actually threatens the company is the $518 billion ahead of it, not the $42 billion behind it.

Can Anthropic afford its compute commitments?

Not from anything on its December balance sheet. The chart sets the $518 billion obligation against each resource the prospectus and later reporting disclose. On a log scale each gap line is the distance between what Anthropic has and what it owes.

Anthropic's $518B obligation as a multiple of its resourcesThe $518 billion obligation is 113 times 2025 revenue, 71 times 2025 compute spend, 41 times 2025 operating expenses, 26 times year-end cash, 8 times the July 2026 run-rate, 5.2 times a reported $100 billion IPO raise and 2.7 times the midpoint of the 2028 revenue forecast.$3B$10B$30B$100B$300BUS$ billions (log scale)Obligation isObligations: $518B2025 revenueprospectus, via Reuters$4.6B113x2025 compute spendprospectus, via Reuters$7.33B71x2025 operating costsprospectus, via Reuters$12.65B41xCash, 31 Dec 2025incl. short-term investments$20.28B26xRun-rate, July 2026annualized, per CNBC$65B8.0xIPO raisereported, not confirmed$100B5.2x2028 revenue forecastmidpoint of $190B–$200B$195B2.7x
Anthropic's $518B obligation as a multiple of its resources
ResourceValueObligations as a multiple
2025 revenue (prospectus, via Reuters)$4.6B113x
2025 compute spend (prospectus, via Reuters)$7.33B71x
2025 operating costs (prospectus, via Reuters)$12.65B41x
Cash, 31 Dec 2025 (incl. short-term investments)$20.28B26x
Run-rate, July 2026 (annualized, per CNBC)$65B8.0x
IPO raise (reported, not confirmed)$100B5.2x
2028 revenue forecast (midpoint of $190B–$200B)$195B2.7x
The $518 billion obligation against Anthropic's disclosed resources. The right-hand column shows how many times over the obligation is each resource. Log scale: each gridline step is roughly a threefold change.Source: Capital & Compute calculation from Reuters (28 Sept 2026 and 14 Aug 2026), CNBC (17 Aug 2026) and reported IPO size

The chart tells a simple story. Against the backward-looking numbers the gap is enormous: 113 times revenue, 26 times cash. Against the forward-looking numbers it closes quickly. The obligation is 8 times the July run-rate and 2.7 times the 2028 revenue forecast. The contracts only work if revenue keeps compounding, which is why the timing of the public raise matters as much as its size.

The prospectus itself explains why the spending cannot simply be dialled down. Per the 29 September Reuters report, Anthropic tells investors that customer usage, and so revenue, “is driven by new models”, and that a “continuous and overlapping cadence” of releases is “inherent to remaining at the frontier of AI development”. Read alongside the $518 billion, that sentence is the business model: new models sell, new models need compute, and the compute is contracted years ahead. The obligations are how Anthropic keeps its revenue, not optional expansion capex.

There is a rate check on that too. If the reported Google commitment is $200 billion over five years, it alone implies about $40 billion a year, 5.5 times Anthropic’s entire 2025 compute bill. Annual compute spend has to grow roughly that much for the backlog to be used, not just paid for.

Why does inference keep the margin low?

Compute has two jobs: training the next model and serving the current one. The prospectus figure, as reported, lumps them together, but earlier leaks separate them. The Information reported in January 2026 that Anthropic cut its 2025 gross-margin projection to 40%, 10 points below plan, because inference costs on Google and Amazon infrastructure ran 23% above its own forecast. An earlier Information report, covered by TechCrunch in November 2025, put the 2028 target at 77%. Both are leaked internal projections, not filed numbers. The public S-1 will show whether the 40% held.

The 23% overrun is the mechanism to watch. Anthropic earns its revenue from API usage and subscriptions, and every extra token it serves costs it compute. Cheaper models help: Claude Opus 5.5 lists at $4 and $20 per million tokens, 20% below Opus 5. But lower prices only lift margin if cost per token falls faster than price per token. The model price tracker follows the price side of that race.

What does the prospectus mean for the IPO valuation?

Anthropic’s last private price was a $965 billion post-money valuation in its $65 billion Series H in May 2026. Reuters reports that the IPO could value it at more than $2 trillion, and in August Reuters reported that this valuation hinges on a 2028 revenue forecast of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion.

At $2 trillion, Anthropic would trade at about 10 times its own 2028 revenue forecast and about 31 times its July run-rate. For comparison, the year’s largest listing so far, SpaceX, debuted in June at a $1.77 trillion valuation and, per the same Reuters report, has traded above its $135 offer price since. The record memory-chip debut in July, CXMT’s 466% first-day jump, showed how far public demand can outrun fundamentals on day one. Anthropic’s valuation depends less on day one than on whether revenue grows into $518 billion of obligations before those obligations come due.

When is the Anthropic IPO?

There is no date. Anthropic’s June filing says the offering “will depend on market conditions and other factors”. On 5 September Reuters reported the listing was expected to complete days before the US midterm elections. The 28 September report says the debut is now “likely to be pushed to after the November US midterm elections”. Anthropic has picked Nasdaq for the listing, Business Insider reported on 14 September (as relayed by The Fly). Bloomberg reported in June that Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs will lead the deal. Under SEC staff guidance on draft registration statements, the public S-1 has to be on EDGAR at least 15 days before the roadshow starts, so its appearance is the reliable signal that a date is close. OpenAI, the other lab in the race, submitted its own confidential draft S-1 a week after Anthropic, on 8 June.

The people who built Anthropic’s rivals are raising money too: the startups founded by OpenAI and Anthropic alumni are covered separately.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Anthropic spend on compute?
Anthropic spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure in 2025, according to its IPO prospectus as reported by Reuters on 28 September 2026. That was about three times its 2024 spending, more than half of its $12.65 billion operating expenses, and about 1.6 times its 2025 revenue of nearly $4.6 billion.
What is the $518 billion in Anthropic compute obligations?
It is the total of cloud, computing and infrastructure spending Anthropic is committed to "in coming years", per the prospectus as reported by Reuters. It is a multi-year backlog across providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, SpaceX, Nscale and Akamai, not a single year of spending. The prospectus has not been made public, so the schedule and counterparty split are not yet disclosed.
Why did Anthropic lose $42 billion in 2025?
About $34 billion of the $42 billion net loss was a non-cash accounting charge from revaluing financing that could convert into Anthropic shares as its valuation rose. The operating loss, which reflects actual business costs, was a little over $8 billion on revenue of nearly $4.6 billion.
How much cash does Anthropic have?
Anthropic held $20.28 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments at 31 December 2025, per the prospectus as reported by Reuters. It raised a further $65 billion in its Series H in May 2026, at a $965 billion post-money valuation.
Has Anthropic filed for an IPO?
Yes, confidentially. Anthropic submitted a draft S-1 to the SEC on 1 June 2026. The "IPO filing" headlines of 28 and 29 September 2026 describe that confidential prospectus as reviewed by Reuters. As of 29 September no public S-1 is on EDGAR; it must be filed at least 15 days before the IPO roadshow begins.

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