Private investors have been clamoring to get a piece of Anthropic, given its explosive growth. The company announced last week that it had raised $65 billion at a valuation of $965 billion in a fundraise that was greatly oversubscribed by multiple investors who spoke with TechCrunch. Now, with private demand still strong, Anthropic has taken the next step towards going public by filing confidentially for an initial public offering (IPO).
At the Bloomberg Tech conference on Thursday, co-founder Daniela Amodei addressed concerns about AI’s return on investment (ROI). She stated that the decision to go public comes down to capital. “It’s a really big upfront cost to train the models and to serve inference on them,” she said. “My guess is that over time, the sort of core set of companies that are working to advance the frontier are just going to need access to capital, and I think the public market is very well suited to that.”
Anthropic has been growing at an incredible pace. The company announced in May that its annualized revenue had crossed $47 billion, up dramatically from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025. However, this trajectory faces a real test as companies such as Uber have said that while AI can deliver returns, not all of their AI spending has proven productive, raising the prospect that corporations could begin to rein in those budgets and slow growth across the sector.
Amodei remains unfazed by these concerns, believing businesses are still early in figuring out how to deploy AI effectively. “The use cases today, I expect will continue to be the primary driver of efficiency or creativity, whether that’s coding, financial services, legal, [or] health care,” she said. “But as the business community gets more familiar with the tools, we’re all going to learn together. My hope is that over time it’ll be more incorporated into the day-to-day of how humans do our work, and there will actually be a lot more value realized.”
Amodei also addressed why Anthropic isn’t building its own data centers to meet the company’s growing compute needs. “Anthropic’s view has always been wanting to plan for the best outcome but not overextend ourselves such that we’re buying more compute than we could productively use,” she said. “It’s really hard to predict that perfectly. We would much prefer to be on the side of having a little bit more demand for the product than we’re able to serve than the inverse.”
Last month, the company surprised the AI industry by partnering with xAI for compute capacity, a deal later disclosed in SpaceX’s S-1 filing to cost Anthropic $1.25 billion per month.
**Tags:** IPO, AI, Anthropic, Daniela Amodei, Return-on-Investment, Compute Capacity
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