Anthropic’s monster bill

If haunted houses aren’t doing it for you this Halloween, here’s something scarier: Anthropic may owe more than $600 billion in future computing costs before it’s even rung the IPO bell.

According to a confidential draft prospectus reported by the Wall Street Journal yesterday, the Claude maker generated $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up from just $1.1 billion a year earlier. Then third-quarter revenue jumped another 45% to $16.8 billion.

But it’s also committed to spend at least $518 billion on cloud services, chips, and infrastructure over the coming decade, and the total could eventually reach roughly $750 billion.

That makes Anthropic’s planned November IPO less about whether AI demand exists—it does. But the focus now is if demand can keep accelerating fast enough to support the bill Anthropic has already agreed to pay.

The math gets spooky

Compared to the shaky numbers leaked last month in another draft prospectus, Anthropic’s updated documents give investors a fresh look at what could go wrong.

• The $80.7 billion loss: Anthropic reported an $80.7 billion first-half net loss, but about $72 billion came from an accounting charge tied to convertible financing as the company’s valuation rose.
• The huge compute bill: Anthropic spent nearly $9 billion on infrastructure in the first half, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier. Many of its future cloud and chip contracts are long-term, noncancelable, or on the hook regardless of how much capacity Anthropic actually uses.
• The growth question: It has to stay massive. Anthropic’s revenue more than doubled from Q1 to Q2, then rose another 45% in Q3. But compared to its infrastructure commitments the company has made, some analysts have discussed lowering its valuation to $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion.
• The few customers that matter a lot: Roughly 20% of Anthropic’s first-half revenue came from just two customers. That concentration looks great when they are spending aggressively and much less so if one of them cuts back.

In short: Anthropic has committed itself to a future where growth can’t afford to get boring.

AI watches for boogeymen

That matters for the larger market. Anthropic’s enormous costs become revenue for Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, Broadcom, and the wider data-center ecosystem—who all hold up the stock market at large. Many investors already own those companies through index funds and retirement accounts.

So Anthropic’s IPO will do more than put a price on Claude: It will give public investors one of their first chances to judge whether the customers driving the AI infrastructure boom can grow into all the capacity being built for them.

This fall season, we’ll see if the AI buildout convincingly soothes investors’ scaries. If it doesn’t, the fear won’t stop at Anthropic.—HC