Analysis
Anthropic's Draft IPO Filing Shows $16.3 Billion of First-Half Revenue, an $80.7 Billion Loss and up to $750 Billion of Compute Spending, the Journal Reports. The Listing Could Price Before Thanksgiving
A draft of Anthropic's S-1 reviewed by the Wall Street Journal shows revenue of $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier and $4.6 billion for all of 2025, and a net loss of $80.7 billion, of which roughly $72 billion is a non-cash charge on convertible notes, according to Reuters. The company spent nearly $9 billion on compute in six months, has about $450 billion of mostly non-cancellable cloud commitments with Google, Amazon and Microsoft, and could commit up to $750 billion in the coming years including deals still being negotiated. It is seeking a valuation near $2 trillion and, per Bloomberg, could begin marketing the week of November 9.
The largest technology listing in history is taking shape in leaks. On October 21 the Wall Street Journal reported details of a draft S-1 prospectus for Anthropic's initial public offering, and the figures reframe the AI trade that has whipsawed chip stocks for two weeks. Revenue was $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, against $1.1 billion in the same period of 2025 and $4.6 billion for all of last year; Bloomberg reported that the company has told investors third-quarter revenue alone reached $16.8 billion. The net loss for the half was $80.7 billion, up from $13 billion, but Reuters, citing the Journal, said about $72 billion of it is an accounting charge tied to the rising value of bonds convertible into Anthropic shares, not a cash cost. The draft has not been made public and the final filing may differ.
The compute numbers are the ones the market will trade. Anthropic spent nearly $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in the six months to June 30, against $2.3 billion a year earlier and $7.3 billion in all of 2025. Its cloud contracts total about $450 billion over seven to ten years, most of it non-cancellable: $111 billion with Google Cloud, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft, according to the Journal. Total future infrastructure commitments exceed $600 billion, up from the $518 billion Reuters had reported last month, and deals under negotiation could take the figure to $750 billion. Broadcom has agreed to lend up to $42 billion for chips. For scale, Meta guided its entire 2026 capital budget to $135 to $145 billion on the same evening, and Visible Alpha estimates industry-wide technology infrastructure spending at about $1.2 trillion in 2027.
The risk factors, as reported, are unusually direct. The draft cites a concentrated customer base; uncertain access to the computing power the company needs, because the three hyperscalers it rents from increasingly treat it as a competitor rather than a customer; political resistance to US data centres, where most of its capacity sits, a point President Trump underlined on the same day by posting that data-centre builders should pay host communities a "dividend" and generate their own electricity; and, per Bloomberg, model behaviour, including instances in which models showed "self-preserving" tendencies to avoid being switched off and produced responses resembling "blackmail." The filing also discloses 2025 pay for the Amodei siblings who run the company: base salaries of $655,000 each and total compensation of $18 million for Dario Amodei and $16.5 million for Daniela Amodei, mostly in stock.
On timing and price, the reports converge. Fortune said the offering would value the company at about $2 trillion; Reuters reported earlier this month that some investors were weighing closer to $1.5 trillion after growth slowed; and Bloomberg said marketing could begin as soon as the week of November 9, which would allow trading before Thanksgiving on November 26. That puts a $2 trillion IPO in the same month as the Fed's October 28 decision, Nvidia's November 17 report and a chip sector that has lost and regained 10% in a fortnight. For a market trying to decide whether AI revenue justifies AI spending, the prospectus answers the first half, $16.3 billion in six months, and makes the second half, $750 billion, the largest single number anyone has yet attached to the question.