Anthropic’s draft IPO prospectus shows a company growing faster than almost anything in tech history and spending at a matching pace. According to the draft S-1 viewed by The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic made $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion a year earlier. It also booked an $80.7 billion net loss, though most of that is an accounting charge rather than cash out the door.
The headline numbers
The figures come from a preliminary filing the Wall Street Journal reviewed and reported on Tuesday, October 20 (U.S. time). Anthropic hasn’t published the document, so treat these as reported numbers until a public S-1 lands. Here’s what the Journal says it shows, as summarized by Investing.com:
- Revenue: $16.3 billion for January to June 2026, versus $1.1 billion in the first half of 2025.
- Net loss: $80.7 billion, of which $72 billion came from non-cash accounting adjustments tied to convertible notes and other financing instruments.
- Compute spending: nearly $9 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure in six months, more than the $7.3 billion it spent in all of 2025.
- Customer concentration: about 20% of first-half revenue came from just two customers.
Strip out the $72 billion accounting charge and the loss is still large, roughly $8.7 billion, but it’s a very different number from the one in the headlines. Charges like this usually show up when the value of a company’s convertible instruments rises sharply ahead of an IPO, which is a side effect of investors thinking the company is worth more, not of the business burning more cash.
The compute bill
The bigger story might be the commitments. The Journal reports roughly $450 billion in noncancelable cloud compute agreements over the next decade, including $111 billion with Google Cloud, $110 billion with Amazon Web Services and $31 billion with Microsoft. Anthropic also said it could spend as much as $750 billion on compute in the coming years, counting deals still being negotiated. Reuters, which saw an earlier version of the prospectus in September, put total cloud, compute and infrastructure commitments at at least $518 billion, much of it payable whether Anthropic uses the capacity or not.
According to the Journal, the filing also admits Anthropic has asked for more capacity than the big cloud providers were willing to supply, which is why it’s turning to third-party data center projects. It’s the same crunch every frontier AI lab is in, and it’s why SpaceX said this week that it’s adding gigawatts of compute for Grok as fast as it can.
Risks, salaries and timing
The risk factors go beyond the usual boilerplate. The draft discusses model alignment and catastrophic incidents, and warns that damages from a severe AI-related security event could exceed its insurance coverage. On the governance side, CEO Dario Amodei and President Daniela Amodei each drew a base salary of about $655,000 in 2025, and both have pledged 80% of their personal equity to philanthropy, alongside the 5% public benefit fund we covered earlier this week.
As for timing, the Journal has reported that Anthropic moved its planned listing to November, and Investing.com says the offering could value it at up to $2 trillion. Anthropic hasn’t commented publicly on the draft’s numbers.
Why EVX readers should care
Anthropic isn’t a Musk company, but it’s one of Grok’s main rivals and, increasingly, one of the main buyers of the same chips and data center power SpaceX is chasing. Its numbers set the yardstick investors will use for SpaceX’s Super Intelligence segment. It has also had a busy few weeks, from the Replit deal and chip financing to the FTC subpoenas sent to AI labs. When the public S-1 drops, we’ll compare the final numbers with what’s been reported here.
Sources: The Wall Street Journal, Investing.com, Reuters, The Wall Street Journal (IPO timing).
— The EVX News team
Featured image: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei at TechCrunch Disrupt 2023 in San Francisco. Photo: TechCrunch, via Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY 2.0.
