MMS

By William Gavin

Tech giants like Broadcom, Google and SpaceX have plenty of skin in the game as Anthropic heads for the public market

Amazon is a major investor in and a provider of compute to Anthropic, as well as a distributor of its artificial-intelligence products.

Anthropic's upcoming initial public offering is a big deal for Wall Street - and for the big technology companies that have a lot riding on the company's success.

The maker of the Claude AI model has become a major customer of half of the "Magnificent Seven" group of technology companies, which has it on the hook to pay Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL), Amazon.com (AMZN) and Microsoft (MSFT) tens of billions of dollars each for cloud capacity over the next several years. Anthropic (ANT) is also a big user of Nvidia (NVDA) chips through deals with third-party firms like SpaceX (SPCX) and Nscale (NSCL).

Overall, Anthropic has committed to pay as much as $895.4 billion for AI computing power and infrastructure through 2045, according to its IPO prospectus. At least $276 billion of that total is set to be paid to its partners regardless of how much Anthropic actually uses.

That has made Anthropic a big part of some Big Tech business models. SpaceX, for one, reportedly counts the company as its biggest customer, representing 34.5% of revenue in the third quarter, according to a filing. Anthropic also plans to buy or lease up to $271.3 billion worth of Google's tensor processing units through 2033.

"If demand continues to expand rapidly, those investments could support additional growth and improving economics," the IPO research firm Renaissance Capital said in a note. "However, if adoption slows or computing technology changes, Anthropic could face substantial fixed obligations that are harder to offset."

Anthropic also relies heavily on a few partners, including Microsoft and Google, for nearly half its sales. Some 44% of Anthropic's revenue across the first nine months of 2026 came from customers through cloud partners. According to Anthropic as well as some experts, that could create potential conflicts of interest as the company needs to show it can accelerate its sales.

In an updated prospectus filing on Monday, Anthropic said that it generated third-quarter revenue of nearly $17 billion, a 1,127% increase compared with a year earlier. However, the company's pace of growth actually slowed on a sequential basis, with sales up 47% compared with the second quarter of 2026. Revenue had risen 144% from the first quarter to the second quarter.

William Blair analyst Arjun Bhatia said investors are concerned that revenue may not scale meaningfully enough over the years for Anthropic to meet its purchase commitments. Dauvin Peterson, an analyst at 22V, also said that Anthropic's IPO price and its performance will "depend heavily" on revenue trends in 2027.

"Our current view is that Anthropic has a significant hill to climb," Peterson added in a client note, pointing to the company's need to find stickier revenue channels like cybersecurity, among goals.

Anthropic is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion or more in its IPO, which could value the company at roughly $1.5 trillion, according to the Wall Street Journal. If Anthropic can pull that off, it could beat the record set by SpaceX in June when it raised $75 billion.

Such a large amount of capital could help Anthropic pay for its commitments to partners, among other things. A successful IPO would also likely be a big deal for Alphabet and Amazon, which have sizable stakes in the company.

As of Sept. 30, Amazon said it held 164 million shares of Anthropic's nonvoting preferred stock and convertible notes, which it estimates to be worth about $146.2 billion, although its stake is capped at 12%. Google has also backed Anthropic and has the right to buy up to $10 billion worth of stock in its IPO. Its ownership is capped at 14.99% of Anthropic's outstanding shares, according to a filing.

-William Gavin

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