Anthropic can't cancel most of its $518B compute bill

Four out of every five dollars Anthropic plans to spend on AI infrastructure over the next decade are already locked in, according to a confidential IPO prospectus seen by Reuters. The plan totals at least $518 billion, and 80% of it sits in contracts that cannot be canceled.

At a glance

• Anthropic's confidential IPO filing, as reported by Reuters, puts infrastructure spending at no less than $518 billion over ten years, with major commitments to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Broadcom.
• Eighty percent of that spending is non-cancelable, which means Anthropic owes the money even if its own needs change before the contracts run out.
• The same prospectus shows a 2025 net loss of $42 billion on revenue of almost $4.6 billion, and Reuters' report does not break down the $518 billion by partner.

If you haven't been following, Anthropic, the maker of Claude, has long relied on partners' cloud and chip capacity instead of building all of its computing itself. A company preparing to list its shares has to file a prospectus that spells out obligations like these. That is how figures that normally stay private end up in front of reporters and, eventually, investors.

The headline number is a floor. The prospectus puts infrastructure spending at at least $518 billion over the next decade, and the major commitments go to Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Broadcom. The first three run large cloud businesses; Broadcom designs custom chips and networking silicon for data centers.

The finances next to that number come from the same document. Anthropic recorded a 2025 net loss of $42 billion on revenue of almost $4.6 billion. The loss that year was many times the company's sales, while its forward obligations run into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

A non-cancelable commitment works much like a long commercial lease. You agree up front to pay for a fixed amount of space, or in this case compute, over a set period, and the landlord reserves or builds it on the strength of that promise. If your business shrinks, the rent is still due. The buyer gets guaranteed capacity and gives up the right to walk away.

What the reporting leaves out matters as much as what it includes. The material we have does not show how the $518 billion splits among the four partners, which years carry the heaviest payments, or what the cancelable 20% covers. In our view, the 80% share is the figure to watch: set against a 2025 loss of $42 billion, most of the decade's plan reads as a fixed cost, not an option.

What the public filing will show

The prospectus Reuters saw is confidential, so the exact contract terms remain out of view for now. If Anthropic goes ahead with its listing, the partner-by-partner split and the payment schedule are the details a public filing would need to answer. The reporting gives no IPO date and no timeline for making the document public.