Anthropic's draft IPO prospectus, seen by The Wall Street Journal and reported on October 20, 2026, shows a company growing at rare speed and spending at an even rarer scale: revenue of $16.3 billion in the first half of the year, nearly 15 times the year-earlier figure, against a net loss of $80.7 billion. The two numbers only make sense together once the story shifts from the income statement to the long-term compute contracts behind it — and to suppliers who are becoming competitors.
Most of the $80.7 billion loss never left the bank
About $72 billion of the net loss came from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of convertible notes and other financing instruments, not from cash spending. The operating picture sits in other figures: Anthropic spent nearly $9 billion on compute and infrastructure in the first half alone, more than the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025, and third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, up about 45% quarter on quarter. The draft also says roughly a fifth of revenue came from just two customers, and that dependence on a limited number of customers is expected to persist — one reason some investors at last week's investor day discussed a valuation nearer $1.5 trillion than the $2 trillion previously expected. The company is reportedly still targeting a November IPO.
$450 billion in non-cancelable cloud deals, and counting
The heaviest section of the filing is commitments. Over the next seven to ten years Anthropic is on the hook for about $450 billion in cloud computing agreements, most of them non-cancelable and payable regardless of actual usage:
| Partner | Commitment | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Google Cloud | About $111 billion | Running to 2033 |
| Amazon AWS | About $110 billion | Mostly non-cancelable |
| Microsoft Azure | About $31 billion | Running to 2033 |
| Nscale and Lambda | Up to about $86 billion | Renting Nvidia chips |
Adding the more than $160 billion owed to lease Google chips through Broadcom takes total future infrastructure obligations above $600 billion, and a further $150 billion or so is still under negotiation — which would put the full bill near $750 billion. In plain terms, much of the money this IPO raises already has a destination.
When your supplier sees you as a rival
More telling than the totals is one line in the draft: Anthropic says it sought more capacity than its large cloud partners were willing to provide, and that those partners increasingly see it as a competitor rather than a customer. AWS, Google and Microsoft are simultaneously shareholders, compute suppliers and sellers of rival models and agents, so in a capacity crunch the conflict is structural. Anthropic is responding by leasing its own data centers and working with third-party operators, while conceding in the same document that some of those operators have limited operating histories and may be less reliable than the hyperscalers. The filing also warns that liability for harmful model behavior could exceed its insurance coverage — the other side of the safety legislation draft it has been taking to Congress. For rivals, the filing's value is that it turns the frontier labs' compute hunger into contract numbers for the first time: the contest is shifting from whose model is smartest to who locks up a decade of power and chips first.
