Anthropic lost over $80 billion in six months, mostly on paper, per the WSJ
Most of the loss is accounting charges, the Journal reported. The bigger story is a compute bill that could reach $750 billion, much of it in contracts with cloud giants that are also rivals.
By Robert Harrison · · Updated
For information only, not investment advice. Prices delayed.
Anthropic lost more than $80 billion in the first half of 2026, according to a draft IPO prospectus the Wall Street Journal reviewed, Reuters reported. TechCrunch, citing the Journal, puts the figure at $80.7 billion. That's up from $13 billion a year earlier. Big number, big asterisk: about $72 billion of it came from accounting charges tied to changes in the value of instruments Anthropic issued to raise money.
The bigger story is compute. The Journal reported revenue of $16.3 billion for the six months through June, up from $1.1 billion, with two customers making up about a fifth of sales. Infrastructure spending hit nearly $9 billion, the Telegraph reported, on top of roughly $450 billion in cloud contracts over the next seven to 10 years, including $111 billion with Google Cloud ($GOOGL), $110 billion with Amazon Web Services ($AMZN) and $31 billion with Microsoft ($MSFT). Counting deals still being negotiated, compute costs could reach $750 billion. Those same clouds increasingly see Anthropic as a competitor.
For public markets, the awkward part is that Amazon, Google and Microsoft are landlord and rival at once, and Reuters wrote that a cooler IPO reception could weigh on the wider AI market. The IPO, reportedly targeted for November, was previously expected to value Anthropic at about $2 trillion, a reported figure.
At an investor day where Anthropic said third-quarter revenue rose 45% from the previous quarter to $16.8 billion, some attendees discussed about $1.5 trillion, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter. No Anthropic S-1 is public yet. CNBC says the prospectus was filed confidentially in early June. Reuters couldn't immediately verify the Journal's report, and Anthropic didn't respond to its request for comment.
Sources
- Anthropic logged net loss of over $80 billion in first half of 2026, WSJ reports, Reuters (via 1470 & 100.3 WMBD)
- Anthropic logged net loss of over $80 billion in first half of 2026, WSJ reports, Reuters (via KSL.com)
- Anthropic’s cloud partnerships are getting messy, TechCrunch
- Anthropic is AI trade's last big hope for a major IPO this year, CNBC
- Anthropic loses $80bn in six months, The Telegraph (via Yahoo Finance Singapore)
Tags: ipo · ai · valuation · unicorns · big-tech · sec