Anthropic's S-1 makes clear that the AI startup's single largest line item is not talent or research but the electricity and silicon required to keep its models running. The company disclosed committed compute spend of between $542 billion and $567 billion, a figure that dwarfs the $11.6 billion of revenue it generated in the second quarter of 2026. For every dollar spent on compute that quarter, Anthropic took in a little over two dollars, a ratio the filing says it is focused on improving. The math works today only because the bulk of the $567 billion sits in long-dated contracts that have not yet hit the income statement.
The contracts are already signed
The commitments are not aspirational. On December 31, 2025, Anthropic locked in $417 billion of compute deals with various providers, with terms starting between 2026 and 2027 and running up to 20 years. A further $125 billion to $150 billion of capacity kicks in between 2028 and 2031. The counterparties read like a cap table of the AI arms race: Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and, in a series of agreements from May to October 2026, Elon Musk's SpaceX for up to $120.5 billion of Nvidia GPU capacity through 2029. Anthropic has also built a proprietary orchestration layer that routes workloads across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, Nvidia GPUs, and AMD GPUs, infrastructure it says took years of investment to develop and which reduces reliance on any single vendor.
Suppliers are also competitors and investors
The filing describes the relationship with the three hyperscalers as "multifaceted and complex." Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are simultaneously Anthropic's largest compute landlords, significant investors, direct competitors building their own frontier models, and customers consuming Anthropic's API. The S-1 warns that these suppliers could prioritize their own AI workloads, gain insight into Anthropic's compute requirements to inform competitive strategy, or use their equity stakes to influence governance. The circularity is structural: the companies funding Anthropic's training runs are the same ones bidding against it for the same GPUs.
Anthropic Direct is the exit strategy
To break the dependency, Anthropic is standing up its own data centers under a program called Anthropic Direct. Starting around September 30, 2026, the company began entering purchase commitments and lease agreements for facilities where third-party partners will secure real estate, power, and ongoing management. The S-1 says Direct will represent a growing share of compute investments over time and yield long-term economic advantages. It does not disclose the capital committed to Direct to date, the split between owned and leased capacity, or the break fees attached to the existing hyperscaler contracts. Until those details arrive, the $567 billion figure remains a claim on future cash flows that Anthropic does not yet control.