Inside Anthropic's Journey to Record-Breaking Valuation

After a historic US$65bn Series H funding round, Anthropic has truly become an AI giant and the most valued pureplay AI company in the world.  

With its post money valuation touching US$965bn, Anthropic firmly steps over its rival OpenAI, most recently valued at US$852bn. 

This is a crucial moment in the tightening AI race, as both companies gear up for IPOs later in the year. 

Led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, this funding round also drew participation from major investors including Capital Group, Coatue, GIC, ICONIQ, Temasek and Blackstone. 

The round also includes US$15bn in previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including US$5bn from Amazon.

Reasoning given by the giant for the Series H fund is two pronged. First, the company points to ever increasing AI adoption that gifted the trailblazer with an annualised revenue run rate crossing US$47bn earlier this month.

Proof that businesses are increasingly deploying Claude across core operations and workflows.

The popularity comes with compute pressure that necessitates scaling partnerships, products and compute. 

“Claude is increasingly indispensable to our growing global community of customers and we work tirelessly to make tools like Claude Code and Cowork more helpful, more powerful and more adaptable to their needs,” says Krishna Rao, Chief Financial Officer of Anthropic. 

“This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens.”

Anthropic says that it also plans to use the funding to strengthen its safety and interpretability research.

An aggressive growth strategy

When in the AI race, few things matter like your access to compute. Infrastructure partnerships are hence of supreme importance.

In recent weeks, Anthropic says it has significantly expanded its compute capacity through agreements with Amazon, Google, Broadcom and SpaceX. 

Taking stock, this includes up to five gigawatts of new capacity from Amazon alongside five gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity from Google and Broadcom.

The company has also partnered with Elon Musk’s SpaceX for GPU capacity within Colossus 1 and Colossus 2, solidifying its scalability in an exponentially growing space.

Strategic infrastructure partners including Micron, Samsung and SK hynix have also joined the effort, reflecting how semiconductor and cloud providers are becoming increasingly central to AI development.

Anthropic also boasts being the first frontier AI model available on all three of the world's largest cloud platforms – Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure simultaneously – although AWS remains its primary cloud provider and training partner.

“Startups and Global 5000 companies alike are deploying Claude to handle complex workflows and in doing so, Claude is learning how businesses actually operate: the context, the processes, the judgment,” says Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia Capital. 

“Anthropic is building the bridge between where enterprise AI stands today and where it's headed.”

Popular, profitable and IPO-ready  

2026 has the AI trifecta planning for debut in the stock exchange – SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic.  

Industry reports suggest that SpaceX could go public as early as June, while OpenAI is rumoured to have picked a September window, with Anthropic expected to follow. 

While OpenAI has long been viewed as the dominant force in generative AI, the much newer Anthropic seems to have hitched a shorter hike up the AI ladder. 

OpenAI is still burning through cash, with a projected loss of US$74bn in 2028, while Anthropic is on course to US$17bn profitability in the same year, as per Forbes reporting. 

The profitability gulf may have a particular reason. While 85% of Anthropic’s revenue comes from enterprise and developer customers, the same percent of OpenAI’s revenue is drawn off of consumers.  

With enterprise clients bringing in three to five times more revenue per token and having eight out of the Fortune 10 firmly in its pocket, Anthropic has built a solid foundation with projected profits, while OpenAI has nearly a billion weekly users 95% of whom pay nothing. 

This Series H round has made Anthropic the first company to approach a US$1tn valuation in a formal private funding round, narrowly edging toward the milestone that SpaceX has already surpassed in secondary market valuations.