Anthropic拟2万亿估值IPO，内部人士担忧与资金循环风险

Anthropic is about to pull off what could be the biggest IPO in history. This November, the AI giant is heading for the NASDAQ with Wall Street's biggest banks preparing to unleash it on public markets. The price tag, a frankly insane $2 trillion, plans to raise as much as 100 billion. But behind the scenes, some investors are starting to get cold feet with expectations dropping towards 1.5 trillion. Meanwhile, there's something lurking beneath this historic listing because in late September, Anthropic's confidential IPO filing leaked, and it revealed some not so savory details about the company Wall Street is preparing to sell to the public. more than $500 billion committed to suppliers, a financial arrangement where Anthropic's biggest investors are also the companies collecting its money, and a corporate structure designed to keep control firmly in the hands of insiders even after the public buys in.

So, is Wall Street about to unleash the next great investment opportunity, or are investors just being dumped on? To find out, we need to follow the money, untangle the web of financial relationships behind Anthropic, and uncover who really stands to benefit from the biggest IPO in history. My name is Lewis, and this is the Coin Bureau. So, how does a company get to aim for a $2 trillion valuation? Well, in this case, very quickly.

Back in May, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a valuation of 965 billion. That's the post money figure, the value of the whole company once the new cash was counted. It was already a crazy number for a company that had never been listed anywhere. 5 months later, the IPO pitch more than doubled it. Now, for context, Anthropic's revenue in 2025 was about 4.6 billion. That's up from around 400 million the year before, which is a massive jump by any standard.

But at 2 trillion, the price works out to roughly 430 times what the company brought in during its last full year. Now, to be fair, 2026 revenue has grown sharply with a run rate reportedly above 65 billion. Against that, $2 trillion is closer to 30 times revenue. So, the pitch isn't just a bet on the anthropic that exists today. It has to do with what investors expect it to become. And that expectation has to carry the weight of everything else in the filing.

Starting with where the money has been coming from. So who has actually been funding Anthropic climb? Well, mostly two companies. Amazon and Alphabet are Anthropic's two biggest investors. They're also its two biggest cloud suppliers. So the companies writing the checks are the same companies sending the invoices. To see what that does in practice, let's follow a single dollar. It starts at Amazon, which puts it into Anthropic in exchange for a stake.

Anthropic needs that dollar to train and run its clawed models, and that takes huge amounts of computing power. So, it rents that power from Amazon Web Services, which rents out servers and chips to other businesses. The dollar leaves Anthropic as payment on an AWS bill and it lands back at Amazon as cloud revenue. Amazon ends up holding a stake in Anthropic and booking revenue from the money that it invested. Alphabet runs the same concept through Google Cloud.

Its dollar goes in as investments and it comes back as payment for Google's AI chips known as TPUs or tensor processing units. And just like Amazon, it collects on both ends. Now, to be clear, this isn't a loose arrangement that either side can drift away from. It's written into contracts that run for years. Anthropic owes AWS about 110 billion over 10 years, running all the way to April 2036. That buys it up to 5 GW of capacity on Amazon's Tranium chips.

And it owes Google Cloud about $111 billion through July 2033 for up to a million TPUs. Put those together and more than $220 billion is owed to two companies that are also on Anthropic's shareholder register. So, Amazon and Alphabet win twice. Every bill Anthropic pays them is revenue. Every jump in Anthropic's valuation lifts the stakes that they already hold. And the jump from 965 billion to $2 trillion is the biggest one yet.

Which brings us to the IPO money. Up to $100 billion of fresh cash is about to arrive from public buyers. According to reports on the filings, that's earmarked for general corporate purposes. But Anthropic's biggest cost is compute and the contracts for that compute are already signed. So the IPO money heads into the same pipes the Amazon and Alphabet dollars did. Comes in from public buyers and goes out as payments to suppliers.

And because those payments are fixed by contract, the suppliers get paid before anyone else does. Public buyers are the newest source of dollars flowing into the system. Now, stories like this move fast, and the important bits of detail are usually buried hundreds of pages into a filing. That's why our research team digs into them every single day in the Coin Bureau Club. Members get all of the team's research across major markets, plus direct access to the teams themselves through our private Discord.

So, if you want the people tracking stuff like this one in your corner, the link is in the description, or you can scan the QR code that should be on the screen right now. Okay, now back to Anthropic's bills. So, how much does Anthropic actually owe once you add up every supplier? Well, a lot more than $220 billion. The filing lists $518 billion in compute commitments running through to 2036, and 80% of that can't be cancelled.

Here's how those contracts work. Anthropic agrees to buy a fixed amount of computing capacity over a set period. If it uses all of it, then it pays. And if it uses half of it, it still pays for all of it. This is what's known as a take or pay contract. The bill needs to be paid whether the chips are running flat out or sitting idle. It's a bit like signing a 10-year lease on a shop on the high street. The rent is due on the first of every month.

It's due when the shop is packed. It's due when the shop is empty. and it's still due if you decide halfway through that you don't want to shop at all. Anthropic shops are data centers and it has signed several of these leases with some of the biggest landlords in tech. Broadcom, the chip designer is the largest of them at $161 billion. That deal bundles in equipment leases and a financing package backed by Blackstone.

Then come Google Cloud and AWS, the investor suppliers from the loop. and Microsoft adds $31 billion more starting this November and running into 2033. The non-cancellable portion comes to around $414 billion spread evenly. That's about $41 billion due every single year for 10 years. Now consider the business that signed up for all of this. The filings picture of 2025 is a company that brought in $4.6 6 billion of revenue and posted an operating loss of around 8 billion.

The biggest cost behind that loss was compute at 7.3 billion, nearly 60% of everything the company spent to operate. So the thing that Anthropic was already losing money on is what it has committed to buy at many times the scale for the next decade. And the cost side of this business isn't a budget that gets trimmed when times are tight. Anthropic has a stack of signed contracts with dates on them. And a bill that size only works if the money coming in is as dependable as the money going out.

Which brings us to an important question. Who is actually paying Anthropic? Well, mostly customers who can leave whenever they like. About 83% of Anthropic's 2025 revenue was usage based. That means customers pay for what they use as they use it rather than signing up for a fixed plan. And the filing tells us exactly what that means. Many of Anthropic's large customers have no long-term contracts, and they could cut or shift their spending quickly.

When they do, revenue falls, and the fixed costs stay where they are. Then there's how concentrated those customers are. Just two of them made up about a quarter of 2025 revenue at roughly 12% each. Imagine one of th