Anthropic CEO says computing scale is its hardest call as IPO nears

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said deciding the scale of the company's AI computing investment is its hardest management problem, telling an investor event that both over-investing and under-investing carry risk. Amodei spoke with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon at the bank's New York headquarters on the 13th, according to aitimes.com.

Amodei said a main reason for pursuing an IPO is to raise funds for large computing investments and hedge financial risk. Anthropic plans to raise up to $64.4 billion through the offering and $26 billion through a concurrent private placement, for a total of $90.4 billion. It will set its offering price on the 18th and begin trading on Nasdaq on the 19th.

According to Anthropic's recently disclosed securities filing, computing and infrastructure purchase and lease commitments total $900.9 billion, with $71 billion of spending scheduled in the fiscal year through September 2027. As of the end of September, the company held about $95 billion in cash and cash equivalents and about $36 billion in short-term investments.

Amodei described a strategy of buying computing flexibly according to demand rather than securing large amounts at once. He said the company uses growth trends of products such as Claude Code to forecast demand and buys extra capacity on short-term markets with cash if needed. Anthropic has also agreed with SpaceX to receive up to $3.1 billion per month in computing capacity from SpaceX data centers.

Bill Ackman of Pershing Square and Chase Coleman, founder of Tiger Global, were among the Wall Street investors attending the event.