Anthropic files to go public: how the AI boom is being paid for

What happened

On 26 October Anthropic, the developer of the Claude artificial intelligence models, made its filing to sell shares on the stock market public. It plans to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT. The size of the offering and the price range have not been set. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the company could seek to raise about $100bn at a valuation of up to $2 trillion; its last private funding round, in May, valued it at $965bn.

The filing shows revenue of $16.3bn in the first six months of 2026, up from $1.2bn a year earlier. It also shows a net loss of $80.7bn. About $72bn of that was a non-cash charge; the operating loss, from running the business, was $693m.

It was not the only deal that day. Meta announced a share offering of up to $95bn to fund its AI spending, and SpaceX arranged about $40bn to buy chips from Nvidia, financed through a lease with the investment firm Apollo, according to Bloomberg.

Three ways to pay for investment

Building AI needs chips, data centres and power, paid for years before the revenue arrives. A company can fund that in three main ways.

• Selling shares (equity). Investors hand over money in exchange for part ownership. Nothing has to be repaid, but existing owners now own a smaller slice. An initial public offering, or IPO, is a company’s first sale of shares to the public; Meta’s offering is a sale of new shares by a company already listed.
• Borrowing (debt). Loans and bonds must be repaid with interest, whatever happens. Debt is cheaper while lenders are confident, but riskier if revenue disappoints.
• Leasing. Someone else buys the equipment and rents it to the company. SpaceX’s chip deal works this way: the lender owns the chips, and the company pays to use them.

Companies whose future cash flows are uncertain tend to rely more on shares, because shareholders, unlike lenders, are not owed fixed payments.

Why a huge loss can be mostly on paper

Anthropic raised some of its earlier money through instruments that can turn into shares later, such as convertible notes. Accounting rules require the company to record what those instruments are worth today. When the company’s own valuation rises, the instruments become more valuable to their holders, and the company has to book the increase as a loss.

No cash leaves the company, but the charge still appears in the net loss. That is why investors reading a filing like this look at revenue growth, the operating result and cash flow alongside the bottom line.

Where it sits in the chain

This is Link 5, the real economy. Spending on chips and data centres counts as business investment, one of the parts of GDP. How long it lasts depends partly on whether investors keep supplying the money. Bloomberg reports that some investors worry the pace of borrowing and share sales may not be sustainable, and shares of some companies that rent out computing power have fallen over the past month.

What to watch

• The price range and size of the offering, once set.
• US growth figures for July to September on 29 October, and how much came from business investment.
• Further share sales and debt deals by technology companies.

Disclosure: drafts on this site are prepared with the help of Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. This article reports the filing and does not assess the company or its shares.