Anthropic Discloses $895 Billion in Computing Contracts

Anthropic informed the SEC in a revised version of its IPO filing submitted on Monday (2) that it has approximately $895.4 billion in computing and infrastructure spending commitments under purchase and lease contracts. The figure was left blank in the original S-1. The same amendment revealed the audited results for the third quarter: revenue of about $17 billion and an operational loss of $567 million, one quarter after the company reported its first operational profit of $974 million.

According to the document, the shift to a loss was primarily due to computing purchased under short-term contracts, which is significantly more expensive than multi-year agreements. Anthropic spent $5 billion in this mode during the quarter. Revenue growth from the second quarter has slowed, according to the coverage of the document.

Who is on the Other Side of the Contracts

The largest share goes to Broadcom: $161.2 billion in rental under five-year equipment leases, for TPU-based capacity, according to the amendment. Amazon appears with at least $110 billion between May 2026 and April 2036, under a contract that requires spending regardless of usage. Microsoft totals $44.9 billion between November 2026 and May 2033. The described contracts can only be canceled in cases of material noncompliance that are not remedied by the supplier.

The total is not yet the ceiling. The Register estimated that the complete tally could exceed $1 trillion, by adding agreements with no fixed value, such as the planned purchase of chips from Google and anticipated spending with AMD, which are not included in the $895 billion. Seeking Alpha calculated that the commitments equate to nearly seven times the company's cash.

The Argument from Both Sides

An alarming reading is already circulating. An opinion piece urged the SEC to hold off on the IPO until investors understand the weight of the obligations. The rationale is straightforward: a company that has returned to operational loss has signed non-cancelable contracts that total multiple times its annualized revenue.

The flaw in this reading is comparing Anthropic to a hyperscaler. Amazon and Microsoft finance capex with cash from mature businesses; Anthropic finances with approximately $17 billion in quarterly revenue and with funds raised in the market. The relevant question is not whether $895 billion is a lot but whether revenue grows faster than the payment schedule. And there, the quarterly data is the least helpful to the optimistic thesis: the slowdown occurred precisely in the quarter when the company paid more for short-term capacity.

There is also the supporting argument that the market tends to underestimate. Long-term contracts are what drive down the cost per unit of computing, and the third-quarter loss comes, by the company's own explanation, from not having contracted sufficient capacity. If the explanation is correct, the commitments are the cure for the loss, not the cause. The amendment does not provide evidence to prove this, and proof will only come with the next quarters.

What Changes for Those Buying Claude

For consulting firms, the S-1 has ceased to be an investor's reading. Deloitte released Claude to over 470,000 professionals in 2025, in what Anthropic called its largest corporate deployment. Accenture has set up a dedicated business unit with Anthropic and committed to training about 30,000 people to deliver solutions with Claude. These firms sell clients projects built on a supplier whose cost structure is now public.

For the CIO, the implication is contractual. A supplier with $895 billion in fixed obligations has a strong incentive to lock customers into long-term consumption commitments and to adjust prices when short-term computing weighs on margins. Pricing clauses, model portability, and adjustment limits become a committee issue, not a purchasing issue.

The most revealing detail of the amendment lies in the list of counterparties. Broadcom, Amazon, Google, and Microsoft appear simultaneously as suppliers, investors, or business partners of Anthropic. For those assessing concentration risk, the S-1 shows that the health of an AI lab and that of four tech giants are intertwined through the same contract.