Anthropic Wants a $2 Trillion IPO. Its Last Private Round Priced It at $965 Billion.

Anthropic wants to go public at more than $2 trillion, a figure that would make it the largest IPO in history and more than double the $965 billion valuation its investors agreed to five months earlier, in the Series H round that closed in May. The company's own confidential prospectus, prepared in June and reviewed by Reuters, shows why that jump is a hard sell: 2025 revenue came in at $4.6 billion, and the net loss for the same year was $42 billion.

The company spent $7.33 billion on computing and infrastructure against that $4.6 billion in revenue, roughly $1.60 in compute cost for every dollar of sales. Anthropic ended 2025 with $20.28 billion in cash and short-term investments on hand.

The math behind $518 billion in locked spending

Against that cash position, Anthropic has committed to $518 billion in cloud and computing spending over the next decade. Google is owed $111.1 billion of that, Amazon $110 billion, and Broadcom's chip leases run $161.2 billion. Roughly 80 percent of those commitments cannot be canceled once signed, which means the bills keep coming even if revenue growth slows from its current pace.

Revenue is growing fast enough that bulls can point to real numbers of their own. Annualized revenue reached $65 billion by July, and the company has told prospective investors it expects $100 billion to $120 billion annualized by year end, up from $47 billion in May. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are leading the offering, and Nvidia anchored the relationship with a $10 billion investment in November 2025.

Not everyone underwriting the story buys the number

“What would otherwise in a very clean sheet IPO maybe would have been a $2 trillion market cap, now you're at one or less.”

Palihapitiya argues regulatory risk and the gap between private and public pricing will push the deal closer to $1 trillion. He noted that even at that lower number, Anthropic would still raise about $200 billion, enough to keep funding its infrastructure buildout, calling it a workable outcome for both the company and IPO buyers.

What 30 times sales has meant for past tech IPOs

Sean Williams, writing for the Motley Fool, applies a price-to-sales yardstick: at $2 trillion against the $65 billion annualized run rate, Anthropic would trade near 30 times sales. Williams argues that three decades of public-market history show no company at the frontier of a new technology has held a price-to-sales ratio above 30 for long, though his piece names the pattern rather than specific prior cases. Measured against 2025's actual booked revenue of $4.6 billion rather than the projected run rate, the multiple is closer to 435 times, a gap between the confirmed number and the forecast number the prospectus does not close.

“IPOs need hype and puffery.”

Burry, known for shorting the 2008 mortgage bubble, was reacting to the shape of the filing itself: Anthropic devotes about 80 of its 261 prospectus pages to risk factors, including warnings that advanced AI could pose catastrophic risk to humanity, versus 48 pages describing the actual business. He read the imbalance as a tell, warnings about existential risk sitting next to a pitch for the largest valuation in IPO history. CEO Dario Amodei has spent much of 2026 publicly arguing the industry underestimates that same risk; in the prospectus, the identical warning doubles as a disclosure a $2 trillion buyer is required to read before signing.

None of this changes what has to happen for Anthropic to clear the bar it has set for itself. The 2025 loss has to keep shrinking as a share of revenue, the $518 billion in locked spending has to convert into paying customers rather than idle capacity, and public buyers have to accept a private-market multiple that has never been tested at this size. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan are betting investors will accept it before Thanksgiving. Palihapitiya and Burry are betting they will not.