Anthropic's prospectus says most of $518 billion must be paid anyway

Reuters has seen a confidential prospectus in which Anthropic, preparing its first sale of shares to the public, says it expects to spend at least $518 billion over the next decade with six partners. About 80% of that sum, the company says in the document, is non-cancelable or must be paid even if Anthropic uses less computing power than it reserved.

The spending is for the computers, chips and data centers behind Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant. The prospectus has not been released, and Anthropic did not immediately respond to Reuters' request for comment.

The partnerships were not new on Tuesday. In April Anthropic said it would commit more than $100 billion over 10 years to Amazon's cloud. What the prospectus adds is the floor under each deal, and the terms that decide who pays if use falls short.

In the prospectus, Anthropic says those commitments are necessary because future demand for advanced AI systems will be "limited principally by the availability of compute."

"If our actual spend falls short, we must pay Google the difference," the company said in the prospectus. Similar terms apply to Amazon, it said.

Four of the partners are on fixed terms.

Google's and Amazon's payment windows have already started, while Microsoft's does not open until November. An uncured material breach is a serious break in the contract that Microsoft does not fix. A default is a failure to do what the contract requires.

On our arithmetic, those four add up to about $413.7 billion, about 80% of the $518 billion.

Deals with Elon Musk's xAI could mean up to $84.5 billion of spending through 2029 on computing power that uses Nvidia chips, and they can largely be canceled on 90 days' notice. Advanced Micro Devices has committed to buy up to $5 billion of Anthropic shares, money into the company rather than a bill Anthropic owes, and to supply computing capacity expected to exceed $20 billion.

What the other side has said

The Broadcom leases, about $161.2 billion, are the largest line. Reuters' account of the prospectus calls them non-cancelable by either side except on default. Anthropic said it is shifting from renting cloud computing alone toward its own data centers and chips it leases directly.

On April 6, Broadcom told its own shareholders something that does not read as the same promise. Beginning in 2027, Anthropic would access about 3.5 gigawatts of next-generation chip capacity through Broadcom, and consumption of that capacity "is dependent on Anthropic's continued commercial success." A gigawatt, here, is a measure of the power the machines draw. The April filing states that capacity in gigawatts, not dollars, and says the parties were still in discussions with operational and financial partners.

One document is describing lease obligations. The other is describing whether the added capacity gets used. On our reading, they have not been shown to be the same promise, so the duty to pay even if use falls short is clearest in the cloud contracts and unsettled on the largest line.

Amazon has described its side to its own shareholders. In the quarterly report for the period ended June 30, long-term commitments customers have made, and that Amazon has not yet recorded as sales, were about $496 billion. The same report cites an expansion with Anthropic of more than $100 billion over 10 years.

Amazon, Google and Microsoft also build rival models while supplying the computing power and the distribution. If that power is cut, repriced or ended, the prospectus says, Anthropic's business, finances and results could suffer.

What a buyer of the shares would own

Last year Anthropic took in nearly $4.6 billion of revenue, 12 times the year before, and spent $7.33 billion on computing and infrastructure, three times its 2024 outlay. The loss on operations was $8.06 billion.

The net loss was $42 billion. About $34 billion of that was an accounting charge for a rise in the estimated value of financing that could later turn into shares, not cash spent running the business.

Cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments were $20.28 billion at the end of 2025. By the end of July the yearly sales pace, which counts the recent rate as if it lasted a full year, had topped $65 billion, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. A person familiar with the figures told Reuters in August, and said the company had shared the number with investors.

In May the company was valued at $965 billion. The share sale under discussion could value it at more than $2 trillion, more than twice that May figure. No price has been set. Anthropic said so on June 1, when it told the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, which reviews stock sales, that it had submitted a confidential draft. In August, bankers told potential investors the sale could raise more than $100 billion.

Nearly a quarter of last year's revenue came from two customers. The prospectus warns that many of the largest clients are not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending.