Inside Anthropic’s $1 Trillion Spending Plan On Data Centers, AI Chips

[00:00:01] Speaker 1: Today on Forbes: Inside Anthropics' $1 trillion spending plan on datacenters and AI chips Anthropics' IPO prospectus filed on Monday unveiled the enormous scale of its spending on AI chips and datacenters. The fast-growing firm, which has already spent over $19 billion on AI infrastructure since its founding in 2021, has already signed contracts totaling more than half a trillion dollars over the next 20 years. Those include deals with major hyperscalers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, as well as chipmakers AMD, Broadcom, and NVIDIA. Those also include compute deals with Elon Musk's SpaceX and a host of neoclouds and datacenter operators, including CoreWeave, Google-backed FluidStack, NVIDIA-backed Lambda, and Nscale. Much of that was already public, but the size of the contracts wasn't until now. According to the prospectus, Anthropics was on the hook for approximately $587 billion in chip and datacenter commitments through 2045, as of June. And over the past four months, the Claude maker signed another $266 billion in new and amended agreements. There's also $20 billion in expected computing capacity from AMD and a further $125 to $150 billion for more Google-designed chips. That means the company's obligations could total around $1 trillion through 2045. That's about 3% of the total $31.6 trillion that consulting giant PwC estimates will be spent on the global AI buildout by 2050. Anthropic's biggest rival, OpenAI, is reportedly budgeting $750 billion for computing power through 2030. The $1 trillion figure is a massive step-up compared to what Anthropic has spent in its short history. From January 2023 to June 2026, the company paid $19.2 billion on AI compute and infrastructure, including datacenters, chips, equipment, and software to manage those operations. After that same time period, the firm generated $21.3 billion in revenues. The majority of that revenue, $16.3 billion, was recorded in just the first half of 2026, a 1,300% jump year-over-year, while compute and infrastructure expenses increased by just 283%. Anthropic's ability to keep building and paying for those centers and chips is contingent on its revenue growth keeping pace. About 80% of Anthropic's revenues in the first half of the year came from consumption-based users, who pay according to how much they use the company's services. The rest was subscription-based. With increasing competition from OpenAI, plus a whole host of cheaper openweight models, it may become difficult to keep up its blistering growth rate. Columbia Business School economist Stan van Nieverberg says, quote, "Their fortunes hinge on whether they can charge these premium prices for their latest model. There's always going to be a next model from their competitor that does a little better. That's going to be a much more volatile business." Complicating or clouding matters is the fact that a number of Anthropic's biggest contracts are with its own investors. Chan An, CEO and founder of private markets platform Tessera PE, says, quote, "Circular financing is becoming more and more prominent. You have a lot of stakes that are intertwined. The probability of the likes of Anthropic and OpenAI going bust is very small. But everything hinges on the fact that they continue growing." Anthropic has a $114.5 billion cloud computing and chip contract with Google, a $110 billion cloud computing contract with Amazon, and a $45 billion contract with Microsoft for computing and access to NVIDIA systems. All three own stakes in the company, though none are listed in the S1 filings cap table. Anthropic's largest contract is a $161 billion deal with Broadcom for chips and infrastructure. The chipmaker also holds $42 billion in convertible notes that can be converted to Anthropic shares. According to the S1, Anthropic expects to spend more than $20 billion on chips from AMD, which agreed in July to buy up to $5 billion in Anthropic common stock. Anthropic also buys memory and storage from Micron, Samsung, and SK Hynix, all of which participated in the firm's Series H funding round in May, which valued the company at $965 billion. There was no information in the S1 on their exact stakes in Anthropic. Another giant contract it has is its $120.5 billion agreement to access NVIDIA GPU chips from SpaceX, which has stockpiled them. The deal will cost Anthropic $3.1 billion per month once SpaceX delivers all of that capacity expected in December. It's also a huge revenue driver for SpaceX. Over the first three months of 2027, it would account for roughly 25% of SpaceX's projected first quarter revenues. That, in effect, ties the fortunes of the two companies to each other. For full coverage, check out Giacomo Tagani's piece on Forbes.com. This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes. Thanks for tuning in.