In my view, this is a genuinely important analysis because it shows not only the scale of the AI boom, but also its underlying economics. 📊🤖
I wouldn’t call this cycle proof of a bubble (sorry to disappoint the Bob the Loser crowd and the skeptics 😂). Amazon and Google are indeed investing in Anthropic, while Anthropic is spending enormous amounts on computing and cloud infrastructure. These services have real economic value. 💰☁️
The real question is different: Can end-user demand for AI grow fast enough to justify the enormous investments being made across the entire ecosystem?
That’s exactly why a potential Anthropic IPO could be extremely important. Public financial reporting would allow the market to better evaluate the company’s actual revenue, expenses, cash flow, and infrastructure commitments. 📈
If AI is genuinely creating massive economic value for businesses and users, today’s investments could become the foundation of a new technological era. 🚀
That’s why I view this process rather positively: it forces the market to move beyond the simple narrative of “AI is growing” toward a much more important question — how much real profit and economic value can artificial intelligence actually create? 🤖💵
And perhaps this internal capital recycling is important for attracting further investment, at least as an indicator of a certain level of stability and confidence in the ecosystem. 🔄📊
🚨 THE $2 TRILLION ANTHROPIC IPO MIGHT EXPOSE THE BIGGEST PROBLEM WITH THE ENTIRE AI BOOM.
The same money keeps moving between the same companies.
Anthropic could soon ask public investors to value it at more than $2 trillion.
But behind that valuation is a financial loop that almost nobody is talking about.
It looks something like this:
Amazon/Google → invest billions into Anthropic → Anthropic spends billions on Amazon/Google cloud infrastructure → Amazon/Google earn cloud revenue → Anthropic raises more money at a higher valuation → Amazon/Google's investments become more valuable
This is basically how the loop works:
Amazon and Google invest billions into Anthropic. Anthropic needs massive amounts of computing power to build and run Claude, so it signs huge cloud contracts with Amazon and Google.
Money goes into Anthropic as investment capital, then billions flow back toward the infrastructure businesses of the companies funding it.
Look at Amazon.
It has invested $33 billion into Anthropic, while Anthropic has committed to spend more than $100 billion on AWS over the next decade.
Amazon isn't just betting on Anthropic becoming valuable. It is also positioning itself to collect enormous cloud revenue as Anthropic grows.
Google has an even bigger relationship.
It has committed up to $40 billion to Anthropic in a deal involving both cash and compute, on top of an earlier $3 billion, for $43 billion total. Anthropic has committed to spend $200 billion on Google Cloud over the next 5 years.
Google can participate in Anthropic's rising valuation while also supplying the expensive infrastructure Anthropic needs to operate.
That becomes much more important when you look at Anthropic's actual financials.
According to details from Anthropic's IPO prospectus reviewed by Reuters, the company generated only $4.6 billion of revenue in 2025, but spent $7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure alone.
Total operating expenses reached $12.65 billion, and its operating loss widened to $8.06 billion.
And now comes the number that makes everything else look small.
Anthropic has $518 billion in future cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations, while it ended 2025 with only $20.28 billion in cash, cash equivalents and short-term investments.
Its future infrastructure commitments are more than 100 times its 2025 revenue and roughly 25 times its year-end liquidity.
Yet the company could IPO at more than $2 trillion.
At that valuation, Anthropic would be worth roughly 435 times its 2025 revenue.
Even crazier, the company was valued at around $965 billion only four months ago, meaning its proposed valuation has increased by more than $1 trillion in that time.
Anthropic is growing insanely fast, and that's the argument investors will use to justify it. Revenue grew roughly 12x in 2025.
But that's exactly where the bet becomes enormous.
Anthropic doesn't just need revenue to keep growing. It needs revenue to grow fast enough to eventually support hundreds of billions in infrastructure commitments, while turning a business that currently spends far more than it earns into an extremely profitable one.
And even its current revenue isn't as secure as a $2 trillion valuation might suggest.
Nearly one-quarter of Anthropic's 2025 revenue came from just two customers, and many of its largest customers aren't locked into long-term contracts. They can reduce spending whenever they choose.
There's another layer to this loop.
When private AI companies raise funding at dramatically higher valuations, the Big Tech companies that already hold stakes in them get to record paper gains on those stakes.
So the same companies can earn cloud revenue from AI spending while also benefiting financially when the AI companies doing that spending get revalued higher.
This doesn't mean the cloud revenue is fake, or that anything illegal is happening. The compute is real and it's actually being used.
But it raises an uncomfortable question: how much of this demand is independent, and how much of it is the same capital moving in a circle?
Big Tech funds AI labs. Those labs spend enormous amounts back with Big Tech. That spending drives data-center expansion and cloud growth. Higher AI valuations increase the value of Big Tech's original investments, freeing up even more capital to expand the system further.
Eventually, someone outside that loop has to generate enough real cash flow to justify everything being built.
That's why this IPO matters beyond Anthropic itself.
Public investors may soon be asked to put a $2 trillion price tag on a company sitting in the middle of this exact system, one carrying hundreds of billions in future obligations, billions in operating losses, and an enormous amount of future growth already priced in.
If end-user demand grows large enough, this could be one of the greatest infrastructure bets ever made.
If it doesn't, the AI boom may discover that investing billions into your own customers so they can spend billions back with you created a lot more reported growth than actual profit.