Anthropic’s IPO prospectus gives a clearer picture of the cost of building and running Claude as the AI company prepares for a potential public listing. The company reported nearly $4.6 billion in revenue in 2025, up roughly twelvefold from the previous year. But it also reported a net loss of nearly $42 billion.
The two figures need some context. Reuters reports that roughly $34 billion of the net loss came from an accounting charge related to financing that could eventually be converted into Anthropic shares. That charge was not money Anthropic spent operating Claude.
What the $42 billion loss actually contains
Anthropic’s prospectus shows that computing and infrastructure have become a major part of the company’s operating costs. The company spent about $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure in 2025, according to Reuters. That was more than half of its $12.65 billion in total operating expenses and roughly three times its spending in 2024. Its operating loss was $8.06 billion, compared with $2.98 billion the previous year.
This is an important distinction when reading the $42 billion headline loss. The reported net loss includes the roughly $34 billion accounting charge, while the operating loss reflects the cost of running the business before that separate accounting item.
A simple way to see the difference is to compare the figures: $42 billion minus roughly $34 billion is about $8 billion, broadly in line with the reported $8.06 billion operating loss. That does not turn the calculation into a cash-flow measure, but it shows why the $42 billion headline should not be interpreted as $42 billion spent on Claude.
Anthropic has also been securing additional computing capacity. In April, the company announced an agreement with Amazon for up to 5 gigawatts of additional capacity and said it would commit more than $100 billion over 10 years to AWS technologies.
Revenue is growing with Claude usage
The revenue figure also tells a more specific story about Anthropic’s business. Reuters reports that about $3.8 billion of Anthropic’s 2025 revenue came from customers paying according to their use of Claude, while subscription revenue was $789 million. That means usage-based Claude revenue accounted for roughly 83% of the company’s total revenue for the year. Anthropic said it expects consumption-based revenue to remain the substantial majority of its revenue for the foreseeable future.
That makes the relationship between Claude usage and infrastructure particularly important. As customers use the models more, Anthropic can generate more usage-based revenue, while the company also needs computing capacity to serve that demand.
Anthropic has described the scale of that infrastructure in its own announcements. The company says it uses more than one million Trainium2 chips to train and serve Claude and is expanding its computing capacity across AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.
The infrastructure commitments are much larger
The prospectus also shows that Anthropic’s future infrastructure requirements extend well beyond its 2025 spending. Reuters reports that Anthropic plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years. That is a future commitment figure, not an amount the company spent in 2025.
A separate Reuters report says Anthropic had $54.6 billion in non-cancellable hosting and computing commitments at the end of 2025, while its total long-term commitments exceeded $417 billion by early 2026, covering 3.5 gigawatts of dedicated computing capacity.
Those figures should not be collapsed into a single measure of current spending. An income statement records expenses incurred during a reporting period, while contractual commitments describe obligations extending into the future.
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