Anthropic's IPO Filing Exposes Tensions With Cloud Partners That Also Compete Against It

Quick Facts

• Anthropic generated $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, up from $1.1 billion in the same period a year earlier.
• The company has committed to spending $111 billion with Google, $110 billion with AWS, and $31 billion with Microsoft, regardless of usage.
• Anthropic disclosed a net loss of $80.7 billion for the six months ending June 30, 2026, though roughly $72 billion of that stems from non-cash accounting adjustments.

Anthropic's cloud partnerships are fracturing under the weight of scale. A draft IPO prospectus, viewed by the Wall Street Journal and reported by TechCrunch, shows the Claude maker has sought more computing capacity than Amazon Web Services, Google, and Microsoft were willing to supply — partners that increasingly view Anthropic as a direct competitor.

The situation puts Anthropic in a structurally awkward position ahead of a planned public offering. The company relies on the same cloud giants it competes against to run its most advanced AI models, and its draft S-1 names that dependency as a material business risk.

A $750 Billion Compute Problem

The scale of Anthropic's infrastructure commitments is staggering. According to reporting on the draft filing, Anthropic believes it could spend more than $750 billion on cloud contracts, including deals still under negotiation. The company spent nearly $9 billion on computing capacity in the first six months of 2026 alone, surpassing its total infrastructure spend of $7.3 billion for all of 2025.

Fixed commitments include $111 billion to Google, $110 billion to AWS, and $31 billion to Microsoft. Beyond the major cloud providers, Anthropic has committed up to $86 billion to rent Nvidia chips from Nscale and Lambda, and more than $160 billion to lease Google chips through a separate deal with Broadcom.

Partners Turn Rivals

AWS CEO Matt Garman publicly defended Amazon's dual role as both investor and competitor to Anthropic. Amazon has invested $8 billion in Anthropic and made a separate $50 billion investment in OpenAI. Garman told TechCrunch that AWS has a culture of what he calls coopetition and has maintained a principle of not giving itself an unfair advantage.

The Google situation is similarly tangled. In April 2026, Anthropic signed a new agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity expected to come online in 2027. The deal extends Anthropic's access from 1 gigawatt currently being supplied to approximately 3.5 gigawatts. But Broadcom flagged a condition in a regulatory filing: consumption of that expanded capacity is dependent on Anthropic's continued commercial success.

A Second Nscale Deal in the Works

To reduce its dependence on the major cloud providers, Anthropic has moved aggressively toward alternative infrastructure suppliers. In August 2026, Anthropic signed a roughly $45 billion deal with Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure company, to rent around 460 megawatts of compute capacity at a West Virginia data center expected to come online at the end of 2027. The facility will run Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips.

Bloomberg reports a second Nscale deal is near announcement, just over a month after the first was signed.

Revenue Surge, Massive Losses

The financial picture is a study in contrasts. Anthropic's revenue hit $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, driven by $4.7 billion in Q1 and $11.6 billion in Q2. Third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, a 45% jump from Q2. The company said it turned profitable on an adjusted basis in the most recent quarter, with an adjusted gross margin of roughly 85% and an adjusted operating margin exceeding 11%.

The GAAP net loss of $80.7 billion is eye-catching but context matters. The company said roughly $72 billion of that figure comes from non-cash accounting adjustments tied to the valuation of financial instruments. Anthropic said it generated positive free cash flow in the latest quarter.

IPO Timeline and Valuation

Anthropic confidentially submitted a draft Form S-1 to the SEC in June 2026. Bloomberg reports the company is expected to file publicly in the coming weeks and begin formally marketing the IPO as soon as the week of November 9, with a target to begin trading before Thanksgiving.

Some investors have discussed a valuation around $1.5 trillion for the listing, down from earlier expectations that topped $2 trillion. Anthropic last raised at a $965 billion valuation in a May 2026 Series H round.

For software founders watching this IPO, the core lesson is stark: building on cloud infrastructure controlled by competitors creates leverage that compounds as scale increases. Anthropic's S-1 puts a dollar figure on that risk for the first time.