Anthropic's compute bill is far larger than its balance sheet suggests. On 30 October 2026, Bloomberg calculated from the listing filing Anthropic submitted on 26 October that the company's future spending commitments on servers, buildings and power come to nearly $900 billion, while liabilities on its balance sheet stood at $117.5 billion and cash at $112 billion. The gap sits in the footnotes to the financial statements, in future obligations: leases that have not yet begun, and purchase agreements for data centres, power and graphics processing units.
Several large sums hide in the footnotes
The largest item Bloomberg identified is off-balance-sheet purchase agreements: between December 2025 and June 2026, these roughly quadrupled in six months to $265.6 billion, mostly infrastructure service contracts such as cloud hosting with terms of up to 20 years. Next come leases whose terms have not yet begun, totalling $321 billion, which will enter the balance sheet as both assets and liabilities once recognised. In July 2026, Anthropic also agreed to buy more than $20 billion of graphics processors and related hardware from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD); a further $245 billion comes from new or amended computing arrangements, $21 billion is described as short-term arrangements, and a guaranty for data-centre development costs is capped at $800 million.
A commitment is not yet a liability, but it still has to be paid
Future obligations are not debts already owed, and accounting rules do not put them on the current balance sheet. But they will eventually become expenses that reduce revenue, and leases that have not yet begun will be recorded on the balance sheet once they take effect. Patrick Badolato, an accounting professor at the University of Texas, said the shift distorts comparisons with past performance; Ravi Gomatam of research firm Zion Research warned that the committed amounts must be paid whether or not revenue keeps pace. Anthropic said in its filing that investing in compute is a prerequisite for long-term growth and that the spending often occurs long before the related compute becomes operational and generates revenue; the company plans to pay through revenue growth and further fundraising, and declined to comment beyond what is in the filing.
Investors must watch whether revenue catches up
Its peers are doing the same: Alphabet and Meta also carry hundreds of billions of dollars in future obligations, and shares in Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft came under pressure this week, partly because the market worries that AI spending is too large. Anthropic's variables also include swings in graphics-processor prices, electricity prices and fuel surcharges, community resistance to data centres' water and power use, and competition from lower-cost open-source models. Bloomberg put the expected valuation for the listing at $1.5 trillion; whether nearly $900 billion of commitments can be covered by future revenue will decide whether that valuation holds. For background, see the site's earlier breakdown of Anthropic's prospectus (/article/2904).
