Anthropic IPO Odds After a $16.8 Billion Quarter: November Holds, $2 Trillion Doesn't
Anthropic showed IPO investors a $16.8 billion quarter and slowing growth on Wednesday, which keeps the Anthropic IPO on track for November and puts the $2 trillion price under pressure.
The investor day proved the growth, but left the profit figures adjusted and unaudited, and handed the bankers a reason to cut the price before they move the date.
Anthropic opened its books to prospective IPO investors on Wednesday at its San Francisco headquarters, and the numbers were in the press within hours. Dario Amodei and CFO Krishna Rao ran the presentation, per Reuters. The headline was $16.8 billion of third-quarter revenue. Every figure came from people in the room, since Anthropic hasn't filed anything public (so read all of it as the version Anthropic wanted investors to hear).
The Anthropic IPO now turns on one deadline and one price. Bloomberg has formal marketing starting as early as the week of November 9, with trading before Thanksgiving. The price is the valuation, which bankers floated near $2 trillion going into the meeting. Right now, it's looking like the date will hold and the price will come down.
What Anthropic's investor day proved
Revenue grew about 45% from the second quarter, which is a huge quarter for any company. Yet for Anthropic, this is a sharp slowdown, because second-quarter revenue had grown more than 140% over the first. Some attendees left disappointed by that curve, according to The Information.
The profit claims were bolder. Anthropic told investors it ran an 85% adjusted gross margin in the third quarter. It also claimed an adjusted operating margin above 11% and positive free cash flow. "Adjusted" is doing heavy lifting there (it means the company chose what to leave out). The Information reports the 11% covers the whole year through September and excludes stock-based compensation. Nobody outside the room has seen a cash flow statement.
One more detail cuts the other way. Between 5% and 7% of revenue comes from customers distilling Anthropic's models, which means training their own smaller models on Claude's outputs. Anthropic told investors that slice will shrink.
The compute bill under the 85% margin
The Financial Times reported a ratio that tells us more than the margin does. Anthropic earned $1.70 of revenue for every dollar of compute in the third quarter.
On $16.8 billion of revenue, that puts compute at roughly $9.9 billion for the quarter. That's 59 cents of every revenue dollar. In the first quarter, the Wall Street Journal reported, compute ate 71 cents. So the cost of running Claude is falling fast relative to sales. That trend was the highlight of the day.
But it can't sit next to an 85% gross margin without an asterisk, because an 85% margin leaves only 15 cents of cost per revenue dollar against 59 cents of compute. The two only reconcile if most of that compute (training is the obvious candidate) sits below the gross margin line. Anthropic didn't say where it sits, so the S-1 will have to.
Revenue gets the same treatment. Anthropic books sales through AWS, Google Cloud and Azure at the gross amount and expenses the partner's cut. That makes the top line bigger than a company booking only its own share would report for the same business.
Will the Anthropic IPO list on time?
The calendar argues yes. A continuing resolution funds the government through December 11, so an SEC shutdown isn't in the way. Reuters places the debut after the November 3 midterms, which fits a November 9 roadshow. Renaissance Capital, which runs an IPO index, expects Anthropic to headline the fourth quarter. I doubt a company stages an investor day if they plan to miss their IPO date.
The deadline is the S-1, the registration statement every IPO files with the SEC. It has to be public at least 15 days before the roadshow. For the week of November 9, the last practical filing day is Friday, October 23. Anthropic's draft has sat confidential since June 1, and as of Thursday there's still no public S-1 on EDGAR. The schedule has already slipped. In early September, Reuters had the prospectus going public in late September and the listing landing before the midterms.
The tape is less friendly. September CPI came in at 3.7% on Tuesday, a tenth above forecast, and the Nasdaq fell 1.88% while CoreWeave dropped 15% on a Gartner warning about neoclouds. The recent AI listings haven't helped either. Cerebras trades below its $185 IPO price now that its lockup has ended, and SpaceX, the year's biggest listing, priced at $135 in June but sits only in the low $150s. Meanwhile OpenAI has pushed its own IPO to early 2027.
The window's still open, but it got expensive this week, and bankers usually answer that with a lower price. Several investors now expect them to guide under $1.5 trillion. At $2 trillion, buyers would pay about 30 times third-quarter revenue annualized, while $1.5 trillion works out to about 22 times. A 140% quarter would have defended the higher multiple, but a 45% quarter makes it a harder sell.
Broadcom holds the biggest Anthropic compute contract
The IPO proceeds have a destination. Anthropic's draft prospectus lists $518 billion of compute commitments, and about 80% of it can't be cancelled. (We mapped the earlier version of this list in the $517 billion breakdown.)
Broadcom sits on top with $161.2 billion of equipment leases, which cover the TPU racks from the Google and Broadcom TPU deal that start arriving in 2027. Google follows with $111.1 billion through mid-2033, and Anthropic covers any shortfall if it uses less. Amazon is close behind with $110 billion of Trainium capacity running to 2036, while Microsoft and AMD fill out the fixed part of the list.
SpaceX is the soft line. Anthropic pays it about $1.25 billion a month for capacity on more than 300,000 Nvidia chips, and most of that contract can end on 90 days' notice. For SpaceX shareholders, that's revenue that can leave in a quarter. For Broadcom, Google and Amazon, the contracts run for years whatever the shares price at.
A $16.8 billion quarter is enough to keep the November date and too slow to carry a $2 trillion price. The public S-1 has to hit EDGAR by October 23. If it's late, so is the IPO.