Elon Musk's SpaceX clearly has a lot riding on the success of Anthropic, probably much to the surprise of investors
Elon Musk's SpaceX (SPCX) depends heavily on the success of Anthropic's (ANTH.PVT) planned initial public offering (IPO) and its early performance as a public company. SpaceX investors may not have realized just how much was at stake before Anthropic released its IPO filing.
Anthropic's filing, released Monday, gives a more complete picture of the relationship between Anthropic and SpaceXAI than the original agreement announced in May and described in SpaceX's own S-1 filing earlier this year.
The filing describes agreements made and changed between May and October 2026. These agreements allow for maximum spending of $120.5 billion on computing power over periods that extend into 2029. Once all the computing capacity is available, which is expected in December, the total monthly fees will reach about $3.1 billion. The fees are different while the capacity is being added.
SpaceX's original disclosure said it would pay $1.25 billion a month for about 325,000 graphics processing units (GPUs) made by Nvidia (NVDA), a leading maker of AI chips.
Evercore ISI analyst Kutgun Maral points out that the new monthly amount is almost 2.5 times the original amount.
At the full rate of $3.1 billion a month, Anthropic would account for a larger share of SpaceX's revenue than previously expected, Maral estimates. The figures work out to:
$9.3 billion per quarter, or about 25% to 28% of SpaceX's forecast revenue of $33 billion to $37 billion in the first quarter of 2027; or
$37.2 billion per year, equal to about 37% of SpaceX's target of $100 billion in yearly recurring revenue by December 2026.
"We do not see it as a near-term revenue risk given Anthropic's compute constraints and $131.7 billion of liquidity, but it does raise the question of how dependent SpaceX is on a single tenant," Maral added.
Anthropic will need as much computing power as it can get because its revenue is growing quickly and it is seeking a high value from investors in the public markets.
The filing shows that Anthropic's revenue in the first half of 2026 jumped to $16.3 billion from $1.1 billion in the same period a year earlier. It also reports a net loss of $80.7 billion in the first half of the year. This points to heavy spending on AI in the years ahead.
Reports say investment bankers are aiming for an extremely high value for the company when it goes public, of about $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.
Anthropic could begin trading on the public markets before the end of November.
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor, host of the Sozzi Unleashed morning show, the 'Power Players With Brian Sozzi' podcast, and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team.