Could Anthropic's Compute Spend Outpace Its Revenue Growth?

Anthropic, one of the world's fastest-growing AI companies, will go public by the end of 2026. According to the latest leaked data from its confidential S-1 filing, it generated $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026, compared with $4.6 billion for all of 2025. It reportedly generated another $16.8 billion in revenue in the third quarter of 2026 -- which boosts its revenue for the first three quarters of the year to a whopping $33.1 billion.

But it also posted a jaw-dropping net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of 2026, compared with $42 billion in 2025. Most of that net loss ($72 billion) was due to non-cash accounting charges, but it can also be attributed to compute spend -- which jumped from $7.3 billion in 2025 to nearly $9 billion in the first half of 2026. Its compute spend isn't outpacing its revenue growth yet, but could those expenses skyrocket in the future and crush its margins?

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Who is Anthropic paying for its computing power?

Anthropic's Claude models (especially Sonnet and Opus) are widely regarded as the best AI tools for generating and auto-completing complex code. However, Anthropic didn't build any first-party data centers or fiber networks to host those AI models.

Instead, Anthropic signed long-term, mostly non-cancelable cloud infrastructure contracts worth hundreds of billions of dollars with Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) Web Services (AWS), Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOG) (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google Cloud, Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Azure, and other cloud providers to lock in their compute power.

Anthropic's compute spending probably won't catch up to its revenue growth as long as the generative AI market stays hot. But if that spending slows down in a recession, Anthropic's massive, non-cancelable cloud commitments -- which total at least $518 billion over the next decade -- will cause those expenses to overtake its revenue growth. Competition from other AI models could also compress its token costs and reduce its pricing power.

What should investors pay attention to?

Anthropic claims to have achieved two consecutive quarters of "adjusted" profitability, but those figures are misleading because they exclude its R&D costs, stock-based compensation, and other off-balance-sheet cloud liabilities.

Anthropic also books the full amount its enterprise customers spend on cloud platforms as gross revenue, but records the cloud partner's 25%-30% cut as an operating expense. That unusual calculation inflates its gross revenue against its total serving costs.

Even though its top-line growth and gross margins are strong, it's nowhere near achieving profitability under generally accepted accounting principles (GAAP). If it doesn't narrow its losses before the AI market cools off, it could struggle to maintain its premium valuations.

Leo Sun has positions in Amazon. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, and Microsoft. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.