Guest Post by Ricardo
Do you know how much $80 billion in six months is?
It’s about $446 million a day, every single day from January through June. And it’s still the LEAST scary number in Anthropic’s IPO filing…
$72 billion of that loss is an accounting charge. Anthropic raised money through convertible notes, and as its valuation shot up, those notes became worth more on paper, so the company had to book the difference as a loss. None of that $72 billion went out the door as cash.
Strip it out and the loss is about $8.7 billion in six months. That’s the number I’d watch, along with the ones no one’s sharing:
– Compute spending hit nearly $9 billion in the first half, more than Anthropic spent in all of 2025.
– Its long-term compute commitments could pass $600 billion, and it’s discussing deals that could add about $150 billion more.
– Some of those cloud contracts can’t be terminated early, and the payments are owed even if the capacity sits unused.
– Up to $86 billion is going to Nscale and Lambda alone to rent Nvidia chips through 2033 and 2034.
– And some investors are now weighing a valuation around $1.5 trillion, well below the $2 trillion that was being floated.
The paper loss should mostly go away once those notes turn into stock. But the compute bills keep coming every month for the next decade, whether the customers keep coming or not.
To be fair, revenue grew almost 15x in a year, from $1.1 billion to $16.3 billion for the first half, and Anthropic has told investors it turned an adjusted profit for two straight quarters.
But if anyone wants to be alarmed, I’d point them past the $80 billion headline to the hundreds of billions in compute bills that come due whether the demand shows up or not.
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[ H/T The Burning Platform ]
