Anthropic's compute revenue is surging: What its S-1 reveals
Yahoo Finance Data and Markets Editor Jared Blikre joins host Brooke DiPalma on Market Domination Overtime to discuss Anthropic's S-1 filing as tech stocks end the trading day higher. Blikre explains the AI company's rapid growth in computing-related revenue and what the numbers show about its business model and its path to making a profit.
We do not know Anthropic's valuation yet, or the price range for its possible IPO. But there is a lot of excitement because its revenue has roughly quadrupled over the past year, while the company has also reported a major loss.
Right.
Let's look at some charts on the Wi-Fi Interactive. Sales reached $16.3 billion in the first half of 2026, and they are rising quickly. But if we look at the numbers by quarter, we can see that growth has slowed. We already knew this because some figures had leaked before the prospectus was filed. Revenue growth slowed to about 45% last quarter, compared with 147% in the quarter before that. Revenue is still increasing, but it is growing more slowly. Now let's look at operating profit. The green bar for the second quarter of 2026 shows nearly $1 billion.
That was the first time the company made an operating profit.
Yes, that is a big change compared with the first quarter of 2025. We assume the company was not making an operating profit before then, either. Now look at its computing costs. This is one reason for the improvement. Anthropic has been able to reduce the cost of providing answers through Claude. Those costs have fallen to about 48% of revenue, compared with 251% at the beginning of last year. That is a major change, and the company is making more money from its services relative to what it spends.
To explain what this means, look at the percentages on Jared's screen. In the first quarter of 2025, Anthropic earned only 40 cents in revenue for every dollar it spent on computing. Now it earns $2.80 for every dollar spent on computing. That means it is bringing in much more revenue for each dollar it spends on computing.