Amodei Calls Compute Anthropic's 'Deepest Business Dilemma' Ahead of $64.4 Billion IPO

The difficulty is timing, Amodei said. Compute has to be bought one to two years ahead, and AI is advancing so fast that nobody yet knows how that progress will turn into economic value. "There's a huge uncertainty in what's going to happen next year," he said.

Anthropic has committed nearly $901 billion, most of it to compute and chips, according to Bloomberg. Roughly $71 billion of that falls due by September 2027, a sum Bloomberg said exceeds the market value of about two-thirds of the companies in the S&P 500.

Amodei said the risk runs both ways. If Anthropic buys too little, it lacks the resources for customers and new technologies, and revenue suffers. If it buys too much, "you can financially overextend yourself," he said.

He described two buffers. The first is gross margin, which he called "quite good," especially compared with other players. The second is cash. Anthropic has a large balance and is seeking to raise more. The company also buys relatively little compute upfront and turns to the spot market for extra capacity when business goes better than expected. Amodei likened that to buying insurance: the company is covered if results fall short and can still invest more when things go well.

He said the compute bets were the biggest reason for going public. The more cash Anthropic holds, the wider its margin for error between having too little compute and having too much.

Amodei has made the argument before, in sharper terms. In February he warned that he could buy $1 trillion of compute starting at the end of 2027 and go bankrupt if revenue fell short, and that being off by a single year could be enough. He said then that he was not sure some competitors had done the math.

Anthropic plans to raise up to $64.4 billion in the IPO and another $26 billion through a private placement, according to Bloomberg. Combined, that would be the largest IPO ever, and the offering is reportedly about six times oversubscribed. The company's annualised revenue run rate reached $81 billion at the end of October, up $10 billion from late September, according to company filings.

Amodei said he was not fixated on a specific month or particular market conditions for the listing, noting that Anthropic had grown from nothing to its current size in six years. The advice that resonated most with him before the IPO, he said, was something like "never let your company be worth a single dollar more than it's really worth," which he compared to a model Anthropic uses internally: "under-promise and over-deliver."

In the same conversation he said he hopes AI will cure cancer and Alzheimer's disease within five to 15 years, adding that he did not know exactly when.