Anthropic's IPO is a bet that growth outruns $900 billion in spending

Anthropic's IPO week

Anthropic's IPO is expected to price Nov. 18, with Nasdaq trading to follow the next day, per Leslie Picker's reporting 1

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. Per Analytics Insight, the roughly five-year-old company is attempting one of the largest fundraisings ever 2

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The deal prices at $70 to $78 a share across 825 million Class A shares, per the same report 2

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. At the top of the range it would raise about $64.4 billion and value Anthropic at roughly $1.4 trillion once options, restricted stock and other equity awards are counted 2

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. Without that dilution the figure is closer to $1 trillion 2

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. Anthropic and its co-founders aim to raise up to $90.4 billion in total when a concurrent private placement with major tech companies is included 2

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. That is below the roughly $2 trillion reportedly discussed earlier in the year 2

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A profit with an asterisk

For the first time, Anthropic turned an adjusted operating profit in the second quarter of 2026 and stayed positive in the third 1

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. Over the first nine months of 2026 that adjusted operating income came to $4.08 billion, per its IPO prospectus 1

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Under standard accounting rules, the company lost $1.26 billion on operations through the third quarter 1

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. The net loss is far bigger: more than $104 billion for 2026 through September, against adjusted net income of $5.6 billion 1

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. Most of that gap is a $94 billion noncash charge on securities handed to partners including Google and Amazon 1

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. Those deals let Anthropic lock in computing power without paying cash up front 1

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Jim Cramer, host of CNBC's Mad Money, cautioned against waving that charge away. In his argument the securities stand in for infrastructure costs the company would otherwise have covered in cash 1

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The $900 billion bill

Per its prospectus, Anthropic has committed to roughly $900 billion in future spending as of September, most of it for computing infrastructure 1

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. That total includes a SpaceX deal worth up to $120.5 billion through 2029, plus agreements with Google, Amazon and Microsoft, about half of it due by the end of 2030 1

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. About $70 billion comes due within the next year 1

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The company's own roadshow projects compute and infrastructure costs at 45 to 50 percent of revenue long term, which supports a roughly 35 percent adjusted operating margin 1

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. Spending on that scale, Cramer argued, leaves only one path to staying profitable: revenue that keeps growing rapidly 1

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. "Long story short, Anthropic's compute costs -- its cash compute costs -- are going to explode," he said 1

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Revenue grew 1,206% year over year in the first nine months of 2026 1

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. Cramer said the math only works if the company reaches hundreds of billions in annual revenue soon 1

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. Bloomberg Intelligence scenarios put revenue compounding at more than 40% a year from 2027, potentially nearing $270 billion by 2029 2

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The bet

The valuation leans largely on Claude, the AI assistant and enterprise models Anthropic sells 2

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. The risks named in the IPO coverage are the familiar ones: competition from OpenAI, Google and Meta, regulatory scrutiny, and reliance on cloud and chip partners 2

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. Cramer called the IPO a crucial test for the wider AI trade, since so much of the market's AI spending runs through it 1

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. "Anthropic is due to spend an enormous amount in the future, so it needs to continue growing rapidly to outrun those costs and remain profitable," he said. "That's the bet you're making if you buy the Anthropic IPO" 1

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