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Anthropic’s IPO filing shows most of its compute goes to R&D, not serving customers
Claude covers what it costs to serve, but the racks on order are another matter.
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Anthropic spent less than a third of its $8.9 billion first-half compute bill on serving customers, with most of the rest going into training, research, and running Claude internally, its S-1 filing shows. It has meanwhile signed up for hundreds of billions of dollars more in TPU and GPU capacity. By our math, it has meanwhile signed up for roughly $800 billion more in TPU and GPU capacity, and revenue per compute dollar jumped from $0.40 in Q1 2025 to $2.08 in Q2 2026, which the company links to capacity purchased 12–18 months ahead.
Anthropic’s IPO is likely to beat that of rival OpenAI, which filed confidentially before CEO Sam Altman said its own won’t come this year, amid widespread doubts about an AI bubble. Whether AI labs can cover what it costs to serve their models is an open question.
Anthropic appears to do so easily: it spent $2.4 billion serving customers in the first half of the year, versus $16.3 billion in revenue. Paying for what it has on order is more difficult. Its five compute deals with the biggest stated amounts would cost an estimated $103 billion a year on average once delivered, more than twice its revenue at Q2’s pace of about $46 billion a year. The company also warns that margins may compress as new hardware lands ahead of the revenue it will support.
The company has three main costs: the cost of revenue, which is the inference cost of running Claude for paying customers; R&D, which is mostly compute for training and research into new models plus any internal use; and sales and marketing, which covers the cut taken by channel partners and cloud platform resellers.
Comparing the first half of last year to this year’s, cost of revenue is up about 2.3x, but with revenue up 14x, that means Anthropic keeps an estimated 85 cents for every dollar after serving costs, up from just 12 cents. R&D is up about 5 times, with 66% or more of the compute going to it, and that’s the main source of its operating loss. Sales and marketing is up 16x, and doesn’t show up in cost of revenue, but its partner fees and marketing would lower what it keeps to 66 cents a dollar. The trend here is that serving Claude now more than covers its costs.
Training, research and internal use, at least (est.)
Revenue left after serving costs, partner fees and marketing
Serving has kept getting cheaper for customers since June: in September, Anthropic’s Opus 5.5 model cut costs per task by about 40% versus Opus 5, says the company, and Fable 5.1 cut the cost of typical workloads by about 25% against Fable 5; each came from “a combination of a lower price and improved efficiency,” made “while preserving our margins.”