Anthropic’s amended IPO filing lists about $895.4 billion in commitments, and Ornn, a company that runs a compute price exchange, estimates Anthropic needs roughly $200 billion a year in revenue to carry the average payments due from late 2027 through 2030. Ornn, in an article posted on X on 9 November, built that figure from the filing. Anthropic’s third-quarter revenue ran at $67.8 billion a year, so the gap is a tripling.
Start with what the filing itself says, because that part is not Ornn’s estimate. Seven named deals add up to $644 billion. Broadcom is the largest at $161.2 billion of rent on five-year equipment leases. Google requires a minimum of $121.3 billion through July 2033, Amazon $110 billion through April 2036, and Microsoft $44.9 billion. SpaceXAI, Nscale and Lambda, which supply NVIDIA capacity, make up the remaining $206.4 billion. The filing says $69.8 billion comes due in the year after 30 September, and $447.5 billion before 2031.
The contracts do not bind equally. Either side can cancel the SpaceXAI agreement, worth up to $120.5 billion, on 90 days’ notice once initial periods end in January and March 2027. Lambda can terminate $34.9 billion of its $41.3 billion if it cannot lease a facility. Nscale has to use best efforts to arrange financing for its GPUs. The minimum-spend agreements with Google, Amazon and Microsoft, plus the Broadcom leases, leave Anthropic paying for capacity it might not use.
Revenue is strong but not locked in. Third-quarter revenue reached $17.0 billion, yet compute expenses hit $9.9 billion, 58 percent of it, and a $974 million operating profit in the second quarter became a $567 million loss. The filing blames much of the swing on short-term capacity bought on the spot, $5.0 billion of it in the quarter, which it says costs far more than capacity under multi-year contracts. About 79 percent of revenue over the first three quarters of 2026 came from usage-based fees, and many customer contracts can be cut or cancelled on little or no notice.
The $200 billion is Ornn’s own arithmetic. It holds compute spending at today’s share of revenue, 57 percent so far this year, and asks what revenue would justify roughly $116 billion a year in payments. That payment level is about triple the $39.5 billion annual pace of Anthropic’s third-quarter compute spending. For the nearer term, Ornn calculates that paying the next year’s $69.8 billion on the same basis takes about $123 billion of revenue, around 80 percent above the current run rate.
Ornn also stress-tests its number. From the cost of revenue the filing reports, it infers a gross margin near 85 percent this year, against about 40 percent in 2025. If the margin fell to 60 percent while a quarter of compute still served paying customers, Ornn says compute would cost about 1.5 times what the company earns. Keeping its share steady would then mean giving customers about 70 percent of capacity and leaving 30 percent for research.
Tripling sounds heavy next to growth of more than twelvefold in a year. Dario Amodei put the danger bluntly in a February conversation with Dwarkesh Patel: “If I’m just off by a year in that rate of growth, or if the growth rate is 5x a year instead of 10x a year, then you go bankrupt.” Ornn reads the commitments as leaving room for growth to slow a good deal, provided each dollar of compute keeps earning about what it does now.
If growth falls short, the money has to come from somewhere. Before any IPO proceeds, Anthropic held $131.8 billion in cash and short-term investments as September closed, and the coming year’s payments would take more than half. Suppliers have arranged another $82 billion of financing, released against purchases, deployments and revenue milestones. Broadcom’s $42 billion note facility charges 9 percent, climbing to 13 percent if revenue targets slip, which makes the debt dearer just when revenue is thinnest.
Ornn has a stake in this subject, since it sells price data on the market Anthropic buys from. Its B200 rental index approached $8.50 per GPU-hour by mid-October and gained about 20 percent by 28 October, while the H100 SXM index added 5.2 percent, reaching $2.96. Ornn adds that these prices say nothing certain about Anthropic’s private contract rates.
Anyone sizing up the IPO is pricing a bet that revenue triples while the contracts Anthropic can walk away from stay a minority of the $895 billion. On the filing’s own terms, SpaceXAI is the main exit.
Ornn, in an article posted on X on 9 November 2026, analyzing figures from Anthropic’s S-1 and amended S-1.
