Anthropic filed an amended S-1 on Monday that, for the first time, puts third-quarter results into its prospectus: revenue of $16.96 billion, up 47% from the previous quarter and roughly 12 times the $1.382 billion it booked a year earlier. The company reported an operating loss of $567 million, after posting an operating profit of $974 million in the quarter before.
In mid-October, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic had told investors it had $16.8 billion in revenue and "adjusted" profit. The new figures come from a regulatory filing. Revenue is not far off, but the profit line now uses a different basis, and the result lands on the loss side.
The two items behind the operating loss
The company attributes the swing mainly to $5 billion in short-term compute. Anthropic has been short of compute since the end of last year, and The New York Times reported that it has signed dozens of agreements with Amazon, Google, SpaceX, chipmakers and crypto miners that have repurposed their sites. Available power is expected to exceed 3.5 gigawatts this year, with plans to double it next year.
The other item is $2 billion in employee donation matching, which is a non-cash expense.
A back-of-the-envelope calculation: add those two items back and third-quarter operating income comes to roughly $6.4 billion. That figure is just arithmetic. The company does not present results on that basis, and the filing does not promise that short-term compute spending will not recur. Reuters also noted that because of the extra spending, revenue per dollar of compute fell compared with the prior quarter.
Net loss has to be read separately. The third-quarter net loss was $23.29 billion, about 41 times the operating loss, and the gap includes non-operating items tied to convertible securities. For the first nine months, the net loss was about $104 billion on revenue of $33.24 billion, and more than $94 billion of that was a non-cash fair-value change on instruments such as convertible notes. The higher the company's valuation climbs, the larger this paper loss becomes, and it has little to do with how the business performed in the quarter. The reports we saw do not break out how much of that item falls in the third quarter alone.
A $895 billion payment schedule
The amended filing discloses purchase and lease commitments for compute and infrastructure of about $895 billion; outlets that relayed the figure put it anywhere between $895.4 billion and $895.9 billion. About half of that falls due by the end of 2030, and $69.8 billion is due in the 12 months after September 30.
Third-quarter revenue annualizes to about $67.8 billion, roughly the same as the amount coming due over the next 12 months. That is a static comparison: revenue is still growing, and this payment is not the company's entire cost base. Still, it shows how heavy the schedule is.
The risk factors in the filing also address counterparties:
"Certain of our compute providers and infrastructure partners depend on third-party financing or credit support"
The filing goes on to say that if that financing is interrupted or becomes more expensive, contracted capacity could be delayed, repriced, scaled back, or not delivered at all. Reuters noted that Wall Street has been worried about debt-funded AI infrastructure, and spreads on tech bonds have already widened.
What is still undecided before the offering
The number of large customers is rising quickly: more than 11,900 customers now pay at least $100,000 a year, up from a little over 1,500 at the end of last year. Growth is slowing, though, from 144% quarter over quarter in the second quarter to 47% in the third.
Reuters said investors are discussing a valuation of about $1.5 trillion, down from about $2 trillion earlier. Matt Kennedy of Renaissance Capital expects the pressure on growth and margins to show up in the final valuation. The New York Times reported a fundraising target of about $100 billion, and Nikkei said up to $3.5 billion of it would come from Japanese investors.
Reuters said the roadshow will begin next week. Accounts differ on pricing and listing timing: some reports say pricing in mid-November, others a listing next month. None of this has been confirmed officially, and the price range has not been made public.
Sources: Anthropic amended S-1 filing, Reuters, CocoLoop, The Decoder, The New York Times, Nikkei; revenue and loss figures checked against the prospectus as relayed by the outlets, and the total commitments figure is rounded.