Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has filed the paperwork that shows just how expensive the AI race has become. In an amended IPO filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, November 2, the company disclosed about $895.4 billion in signed purchase commitments and leases, nearly all of it for computing power and data centers. The number had been left blank in Anthropic's original filing on October 26, which simply read "more than $" followed by an empty space, and investors have been guessing at it ever since. The filing also added third-quarter results for the first time, with revenue of about $17 billion for the three months to September 30, up from $1.38 billion a year earlier. Anthropic is preparing to start marketing its shares to investors as soon as next week, ahead of a planned listing on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT.
The bill is bigger than the business
The $895 billion figure is striking because it dwarfs everything else in the filing, including the revenue it is supposed to support. About $69.8 billion of the commitments fall due within a year, and about $447.5 billion is expected to come due before the end of 2030, with most of the rest stretching out to 2045. That means Anthropic has promised to spend, in the next five years, roughly 26 times what it took in during its best quarter so far. The company did post its first operating profit in the second quarter, but it slipped back to a $567 million operating loss in the third quarter, and its net loss for the quarter was $23.29 billion. Not all of the $895 billion is set in stone, either, since about $213.8 billion of it is tied to arrangements that can be cancelled or that depend on conditions such as a partner securing financing, facilities or regulatory approvals. The filing warns that if a compute provider's financing dries up, contracted capacity could be delayed, repriced, reduced or simply never delivered.
Who gets the money
The filing also names the companies on the receiving end of this spending, and the list reads like a map of the AI supply chain. Broadcom tops it with about $161 billion in equipment leases, followed by Google at about $121 billion, SpaceX's AI unit at up to $120.5 billion, and Amazon at $110 billion. Anthropic also says it plans to buy another $125 billion to $150 billion worth of Google chips for delivery between 2028 and 2031, plus more than $20 billion from AMD, though neither figure carries a fixed dollar commitment and so neither is counted in the $895 billion total. The scale of the spending makes sense once you look at the growth behind it, since revenue rose 47 percent from the second quarter alone and the company booked about $33.2 billion in the first nine months of 2026. Every new customer for Claude means more computing to serve them, and Anthropic is buying that computing years in advance, locking in capacity before rivals can grab it.
A very expensive bet on the future
The filing still leaves the biggest questions about the IPO unanswered, since the price range, the number of shares and the amount Anthropic hopes to raise are all still blank. Some current and prospective investors are weighing a valuation of about $1.5 trillion, down from roughly $2 trillion, according to earlier reports, after Anthropic disclosed its financial details at a recent investor event. The Wall Street Journal had earlier reported a listing in the week of November 16, though neither filing confirms a date. What the filing does confirm is the shape of the bet Anthropic is asking investors to make, which is that revenue growing more than twelvefold in a year justifies promising to spend close to a trillion dollars on the machines that make it possible. That bet only pays off if the demand keeps coming, and if the suppliers Anthropic is counting on can actually deliver the chips and data centers they have promised.
For now, Anthropic has done what every AI company eventually has to do, which is show its math. The math says the company is growing faster than almost any business in history, and spending even faster. Whether $895 billion turns out to be a bargain or a burden will depend on how many more quarters look like the last one, and on whether the partners holding the other end of those contracts can keep their side of the deal. The AI race has always been a contest of computing power, and Anthropic has just told the world exactly what its share of that contest will cost.
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Author: Ryan Gardner, Silicon Valley News Desk