According to a draft of the Anthropic IPO prospectus, the artificial intelligence startup recorded a net loss of over $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026, far exceeding the $13 billion loss from the same period last year. Meanwhile, the company may spend up to $750 billion in the coming years to acquire computing power, as a capital race around AI infrastructure unfolds on an unprecedented scale.
The $80.7 billion net loss figure for Anthropic is shocking, but its components require further breakdown. The report clearly states that the vast majority of the net loss in the first half, amounting to $72 billion, stems from accounting expenses related to the valuation changes of convertible notes and other financing instruments issued by Anthropic. This expense reflects significant fluctuations in the valuation of the company's previous financing tools and is classified as a non-cash accounting adjustment, not directly equivalent to cash losses at the operational level. This distinction is crucial.
Anthropic shows structural improvement in operational losses
Excluding the impact of accounting adjustments, Anthropic's actual operational losses are much smaller than the reported figures. For the entire year of 2025, the company's operational losses exceeded $8 billion. By 2026, the financial situation has shown structural improvement: the company reported adjusted positive profits in the second quarter and maintained adjusted profitability for the second consecutive quarter in the third quarter, with an adjusted operating profit margin exceeding 11% and an adjusted gross margin reaching 85%.
Accompanying the massive reported losses is Anthropic's nearly aggressive investment in computing infrastructure. In the first half of 2026, Anthropic's spending on computing and infrastructure approached $9 billion, compared to $2.3 billion in the same period of 2025. This means that the computing investment in just the first six months of this year has already surpassed the total of $7.3 billion for the entire year of 2025. The increase in burn rate mirrors the growth in revenue.
Anthropic plans to invest $750 billion in computing power over the coming years
The $750 billion figure for Anthropic requires a more precise understanding. The report indicates that Anthropic "may spend $750 billion in the coming years to acquire computing power," a figure that includes transactions still under negotiation. If only committed expenditures are considered, the company's total commitments for computing-related agreements over the next decade exceed $600 billion, with approximately $450 billion in cloud computing agreement expenditures over the next seven to ten years, most of which are non-cancelable.
In terms of specific allocations, Anthropic plans to spend approximately $111 billion on Google cloud agreements, about $110 billion on Amazon AWS agreements, and around $31 billion on Microsoft cloud agreements. Additionally, the company will invest up to $86 billion to lease NVIDIA chips. Anthropic is also negotiating with UK cloud computing provider Nscale to expand collaboration, planning to lease computing resources from its Monarch data center campus in West Virginia, adding approximately 460 megawatts of computing capacity using NVIDIA's latest generation Vera Rubin chips.
If agreements are reached, the total contract commitments between Anthropic and Nscale will rise to approximately $90 billion.