$16.3 billion in revenue, an $80.7 billion loss? What Anthropic's IPO filing says about its $750 billion compute bill

"$80 billion net loss in six months. guess my $20 a month subscription isn't pulling its weight," one X user replied on Oct 20 as news of Anthropic's first-half loss spread. Another wrote: "$80.7b net loss and they still rate limit me at 2pm."

According to a new draft of Anthropic's S-1 seen by The Wall Street Journal, the company booked about $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026 and a net loss of $80.7 billion. Revenue was up roughly 15-fold from $1.1 billion a year earlier; the net loss grew more than sixfold from $13 billion. Polymarket's post on the loss passed 8,800 likes.

Most of the loss is on paper. Per ZeroHedge, about $72 billion came from marking up the value of convertible notes and other financing instruments as Anthropic's valuation rose, not from cash going out the door. Strip that out and the half-year loss is still about $8.7 billion, more than its operating loss for all of 2025. Compute and infrastructure cost about $9 billion in the half; ZeroHedge calculated that more than 55 cents of every revenue dollar went to data centers and chips.

The bigger bill is ahead. As summarized by Andrew Curran from the WSJ report, Anthropic plans to spend about $750 billion on compute over seven to ten years: $111 billion with Google Cloud, $110 billion with AWS, $31 billion with Microsoft, $86 billion with Nscale and Lambda and $160 billion with Broadcom, with another $150 billion under negotiation. Roughly a fifth of first-half revenue came from two unnamed customers.

The risk factors include an "AI incident" line: the filing warns that damages from a catastrophic AI-related incident could be too large to insure. Anthropic is aiming to list in mid-November; Bloomberg reported that OpenAI is rushing to raise $30 billion at a valuation above $1.4 trillion before then.