Cloud giants pull back on compute for Anthropic ahead of its IPO

Anthropic is struggling to secure enough cloud computing capacity from Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, according to a leaked S-1 filing cited by the Wall Street Journal. The three companies, all major investors in or partners of the AI company, increasingly see Anthropic as a competitor rather than just a customer buying their servers, which is complicating its cloud deals as it prepares for a planned November IPO.

The filing adds detail to figures first reported by Reuters and the Financial Times in late September. It says Anthropic believes it could spend more than $750 billion on cloud contracts, though some of those deals are still being negotiated. Even that sum may not be enough. Anthropic is leasing its own data centers and working with outside data center operators to fill the gap, but the filing notes those operators have a “limited operating history,” which could make them less dependable than the three big cloud providers.

The spending comes as Anthropic posts steep losses. The company reported an $80.7 billion net loss in the first half of the year, against $16.3 billion in revenue over the same period. The Journal’s report, drawing on the filing, says just two customers made up about a fifth of that revenue, a concentration that highlights how reliant Anthropic still is on a small number of large deals.

The filing also expands on catastrophic risk disclosures Anthropic has made before about its own technology. It states that the company could be held liable for damages caused by harmful AI behavior in amounts that could exceed the insurance coverage it has available.

Anthropic’s revenue has kept climbing even as losses mount. The company told prospective investors last week that third-quarter revenue reached $16.8 billion, a 45% jump from the previous quarter. Anthropic is reportedly aiming to go public in November, and the S-1 filing, even though leaked rather than officially released, is the clearest picture yet of the finances behind that push. Anthropic did not immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment on the filing.

What happens next depends largely on whether AWS, Google, and Microsoft keep tightening access to computing power as the IPO nears, and whether the newer data center operators Anthropic is turning to can handle that load reliably. The November listing itself will test how investors weigh the company’s revenue growth against losses of this size.