Anthropic’s S-1 makes clear it’s on the hook for billions in compute. Its customers can walk at any time

Anthropic has built a fast-growing business largely by selling its AI services based on how much customers use them. And—as the company’s landmark IPO prospectus revealed Monday—customers are using a lot of Anthropic’s AI services right now.

That’s the good news. The flip side is that Anthropic is highly dependent on outside partners for the computing power to run its services. As its prospectus also made clear, the disparity between the agreements through which Anthropic buys computing power, and the way it sells its AI services to customers, means it could get squeezed if business conditions change.

The AI lab’s revenue is growing extraordinarily fast, with first-half revenue rising 1,300% to $16.28 billion. About $13.1 billion of that, or roughly 80%, comes from enterprise customers paying consumption-based fees rather than individual subscriptions.

The revenue growth reflects the booming demand for AI services, as businesses use advanced large language models such as Anthropic’s Claude family of products to help with computer coding, accounting, and other tasks.

To fulfill that demand, Anthropic has signed massive infrastructure agreements with Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and other hyperscalers. Those hyperscalers, or cloud providers, control the data centers and chips that Anthropic’s AI models run on.

So far, the amount Anthropic pays these cloud providers for compute capacity has grown at a more modest clip than its exploding sales figures. The company’s cost of revenue for the tokens it serves customers was $2.4 billion in the six months ended June 2026, up 135% from the same period a year earlier. The company also spent a whopping $9.7 billion on computing and infrastructure costs for research and development of future models.

Currently, the company says it makes more than two dollars in revenue for every dollar it spends on computing infrastructure. But that could change if the AI lab is forced to reduce token prices, a risk it explicitly warns about in its S-1 filing.

Anthropic’s infrastructure spending is committed well ahead of expected demand. The company has committed at least $475 billion in future cloud compute purchases with its major partners, including at least $389.9 billion pledged to Amazon, Google parent Alphabet, SpaceXAI, and Microsoft alone, alongside deals with Nscale and Lambda. Much of that is owed regardless of how much usage its AI gets. When accounting for deals to lease computing chips, its total commitments soar to as much as $750 billion.

The demand side of Anthropic’s business enjoys far less certainty. As the company laid out in the S-1, much of its revenue lacks long-term commitments, with contracts allowing customers to reduce usage or terminate with limited or no notice.

That mismatch between how Anthropic generates revenue and its expected spending creates a pressure-filled balancing act in the years ahead. Anthropic’s growth has so far helped it keep pace with compute costs. Now the question is whether customers will keep spending at a rate that allows it to absorb these massive commitments.

“We must grow our customer base and expand revenue rapidly in order to generate the cash flows necessary to satisfy these commitments,” Anthropic said in its S-1.

The company also acknowledged that hitting those growth targets could be a challenge. “We expect our revenue growth rate to decline over time and to fluctuate from period to period,” the company wrote.