Anthropic picked a tough week to unveil its IPO prospectus.
Within days of its release, several of the company’s key partners, including Microsoft, Google and Amazon, reported quarterly results that added fuel to existing market jitters around the artificial intelligence buildout. “Everybody’s still full steam ahead on AI, but all the things around it took an interesting turn this week,” Daniel Newman, CEO at Futurum Group, told CNBC in an interview on Friday
The hyperscalers’ results have “raised eyebrows” and created a new headwind in the market, which is “more doubt on capital structure,” he said. No matter the current state of the market, Anthropic was going to have to address a skeptical investor base as it pursues a potentially record-setting initial public offering in the coming weeks. In its prospectus on Monday, the AI company disclosed a net loss for the first half of the year of $80 billion, alongside hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of compute commitments and more than 90 pages of risk factors.
Investors are still waiting to see Anthropic’s third-quarter financials. Heading into this week, fears were mounting about the financial health of neoclouds like CoreWeave and Nebius, which are facing rising borrowing costs and a dearth of lenders as they pursue aggressive AI buildouts. Anthropic gets much of its capacity from Amazon, Google and SpaceX, but it also relies on neoclouds for some compute as it races to expand as quickly as possible.