Billion-dollar losses, but worth $2.9 trillion? The mind-boggling maths of AI

September 30, 2026 — 12:11pm

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Frontier labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are at the bleeding edge of artificial intelligence. They are literally haemorrhaging cash even as their spending, and revenues, soar.

Leaked details of Anthropic’s prospectus for its initial public offering, published by Reuters, show that its revenues are soaring indeed. From $US4.6 billion ($6.6 billion) last year, its sales jumped to more than $US16 billion in the first half of this year.

While the leading frontier AI lab says it will have its second successive quarter of profitability, at an operating level, in the September quarter, last year it lost more than $US8 billion at an operating level – up from $US2.98 billion in 2024 – while reporting a net loss of $US42 billion.

It spent $US7.33 billion on compute and infrastructure last year. Now, it says, it has plans and commitments to spend another $US518 billion on cloud services and data centres in future.

The numbers are staggering and underscore how reliant the AI pioneers are on access to external capital to fill in the funding voids created by the gulfs between their spending and revenues on the one hand, and their ever-escalating valuations to maintain that access to capital on the other.

Anthropic plans to raise up to $US100 billion in its IPO, at a valuation of about $US2 trillion ($2.85 trillion). In a $US13 billion funding round this time last year, it was valued at $US183 billion. Earlier this year, its two latest fund raisings valued it at $US380 billion (February) and $US965 billion (May). The valuations of AI companies inflate faster than their revenues.

If AI wipes out the human race, the question of how much AI companies should be worth would become academic, assuming there was anyone left who could be bothered to attempt the calculations.

Without the ability to regularly attract new capital, those AI companies without the vast legacy revenues of the........

© Brisbane Times