For nearly a quarter of a century, Elon Musk and his essential partner at SpaceX, Gwynne Shotwell, viewed the United States government as El Dorado, the mythical city of gold.
Like machete-wielding treasure hunters, Musk and Shotwell hacked through a tangled jungle filled with lurking carnivores such as Boeing and Lockheed Martin, as well as bean counters and regulators. Over time, against long odds, the pair cleared a path for SpaceX to contracts at NASA and the US military. They sued when things did not go their way. They hollered about unfair playing fields. Most importantly, they delivered quality space products to the US government for less.
And so, after a while, SpaceX found El Dorado and a city of contracts.
Chris Jones, director of Seller Assistant at Amazon, left, and Eric Burns of Anthropicβs Applied AI team on stage at Amazon Accelerate in Seattle in September. Anthropicβs IPO filing shows Google getting a bigger share of the AI companyβs computing spending than Amazon, one of its largest investors. (GeekWire Photo / Todd Bishop)
Anthropicβs IPO filing reads like a ledger of whoβs getting paid in the AI boom. The Seattle regionβs tech giants are on the list, but they arenβt at the top.
The prospectus, filed Monday with the Securities and Exchange Commission, details more than $750 billion in computing deals, including firm commitments and estimated future spending, and offers clues about what its founders and biggest investors stand to gain ahead of the companyβs planned Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT.
Amazon and Microsoft have invested billions in Anthropic and won high-profile spending commitments from the Claude maker. But both trail Google, chipmaker Broadcom and Elon Muskβs SpaceX in their shares of Anthropicβs planned spending on computing power, the filing shows.
Following the compute money: Googleβs chips are the biggest winner. Anthropic has lined up roughly $400 billion in computing capacity, mostly over the next seven years, based on Google-designed AI chips, known as tensor processing units or TPUs.
That total includes $114.5 billion to Google directly through July 2033, $161.2 billion in equipment leases with chipmaker Broadcom, and an estimated $125 billion to $150 billion in additional TPU capacity from 2028 to 2031.
Broadcomβs leases are the largest single arrangement in the filing. The five-year leases provide TPU-based hardware for data centers operated by other companies on Anthropicβs behalf.
Elon Muskβs SpaceX is next. Anthropic agreed to spend up to $120.5 billion through 2029 for computing capacity from SpaceXβs AI subsidiary, formerly known as xAI, which runs a rival AI lab.
The filing says payments will reach about $3.1 billion a month once all the capacity is delivered, which Anthropic expects in December. The agreements run into 2029, though either side can cancel on 90 daysβ notice after early 2027.
Amazon is still a big winner. Anthropic committed in April to spend at least $110 billion with Amazon Web Services over 10 years, through April 2036, and AWS Trainium is one of four chip families that Anthropic uses to train and run its models.
Anthropic has committed to spend at least $44.9 billion on Microsoftβs Azure cloud from November 2026 through May 2033, the filing shows. Thatβs up from the $30 billion Azure deal announced in November 2025. The deal has been amended twice since, most recently this month.
Claude is built into Microsoft 365, and former Microsoft CFO Chris Liddell joined Anthropicβs board in February.
Two smaller providers have deals in the same range as Microsoftβs. Anthropic agreed to spend up to about $44.6 billion with Nscale, a U.K.-based AI infrastructure company, and about $41.3 billion with GPU cloud provider Lambda, both for capacity powered by Nvidia chips, according to the filing.
Will Anthropic need it all? Most of the commitments canβt be canceled, and the deals with Microsoft, Google and Amazon require Anthropic to pay βregardless of actual usage,β according to the filing.
So far, the demand is there. Anthropicβs revenue hit $11.6 billion in the second quarter, up from $787 million a year earlier, and the company posted its first operating profit, $974 million. It still had a $66.3 billion net loss, mostly from accounting charges tied to its soaring valuation.
The company says it has βconsistently operated in a compute-constrained environment where customer demand exceeds available compute.β
Its compute commitments assume that demand keeps growing. Anthropic spent less than $2 billion a month on compute and infrastructure in the second quarter. The SpaceX deal alone is expected to cost about $3.1 billion a month at full capacity.
Paper fortunes: Amazonβs biggest payoff is its stake, which it valued at $190.4 billion as of June 30 in its quarterly SEC filing. That includes convertible notes with $6.2 billion in principal that Amazon valued at $97.9 billion. The notes would convert into stock, subject to a 12% ownership cap that Amazon can waive.
Amazon is scheduled to report third-quarter results Thursday, its first earnings report since Anthropicβs filing. The Seattle-based company has updated the value of its Anthropic holdings in each of its quarterly filings this year, so a new number could come this week.
Google put $10 billion into Anthropicβs latest funding round and can invest up to $20 billion more under a March financing deal. The filing doesnβt give ownership percentages for Amazon, Google or Microsoft. It says only that the three companies have each made βsignificant equity investmentsβ in Anthropic.
Anthropicβs seven co-founders hold roughly 230 million to 245 million shares each, worth about $14 billion apiece at the latest private funding price. The company also gave its own Public Benefit Fund about 847 million shares, or 5% of its fully diluted stock as of June 30, worth about $50 billion at that price.
Anthropic could begin formally marketing its IPO to investors as soon as the week of Nov. 9, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter. It is aiming to go public the following week, according to the Wall Street Journal. The company expects the offering to match or beat the size of SpaceXβs IPO, according to Bloomberg. SpaceX raised $75 billion in June, the largest IPO on record.
Elon Musk accused Ukraine of violating Starlink terms of service by using it for lethal drone strikes.
Musk said Ukraine used the Starlink commercial service for offensive drone strikes. Musk's comment on Saturday came after SpaceX imposed a restriction preventing Ukraine from using the satellite technology on drones flying above certain speeds.
One current and one former Ukraine official denied Musk's accusation and said previous limits imposed by SpaceX already prevented Ukraine's military from using Starlink in the way Musk described. Ukraine officials have accused Musk of throttling their use of Starshield, the military variant of Starlink that Ukraine has access to through a deal with the US government.
Five days after the spectacle, made possible by compressed-gas thrusters developed by Muskβs SpaceX, he revealed the companies were exploring a merger that could accelerate his push into autonomous driving.
At stake is more than a technological race. Car groups, already grappling with growing Chinese competition, are seeking to move beyond a business model centered on vehicle sales towards one that also generates recurring revenues from software and AI-powered services.
Grok Imagineβs first Odyssey episode can conjure ancient landscapes, but its interchangeable faces and robotic performances expose what AI filmmaking still canβt fake.
Ukraine has rejected Elon Muskβs claim that its military broke Starlinkβs terms of service by using the civilian satellite network for offensive drone strikes, with a presidential adviser saying that restrictions SpaceX placed on the service in February make such use physically impossible. Musk made the accusation on X on Oct. 24, the same day [β¦]
A new study found Grok's AI overwhelmingly recommends Republican candidates while OpenAI's GPT favors Democrats, with the two AI models disagreeing in more than 90% of nearly 500 election races.
Elon Muskβs Starlink satellite service has played a pivotal role in supporting Ukraineβs successful resistance to Russiaβs full-scale invasion for years. But with Starlink having become increasingly unreliable due to Muskβs political inclinations and the latest surprise disruptions to service in Ukraine, the Ukrainians and Europe as a whole are now facing urgent questions about how to move forward without it.
As the worldβs largest communications satellite network, Starlink can typically support high-speed Internet and data streams for any user or vehicle equipped with a relatively compact Starlink terminal. This has enabled Ukraine to maintain vital communications for both civilian purposes and military operationsβand has also expanded the Ukrainian militaryβs capability to remotely control or provide guidance to drones used in both air defense against Russian attacks and for striking back at Russian targets.
βStarlink currently offers some of the best satellite coverage available, with virtually no competitors when you consider the combination of cost, availability, and ease of use,β according to the head of hardware R&D at the Ukrainian defense company BlueBird Tech, who provided comments to Ars anonymously for security reasons. βIn practical terms, the main limitation is the need to position the antenna so it can receive signals from the satellites.β
Following the judge's ruling this week, plaintiffs are still seeking to delete or expunge any copies of sensitive OPM data that DOGE agents still possess.
A Wall Street Journal report said SpaceX CEO Elon Musk ordered the Starlink throttling that blindsided Ukraine's air assault forcesΒ last week, despite Musk's claim that all decisions on the military version of Starlink are made by the US military and President Trump.
Trump denied ordering the restrictions. While Musk may have spoken to Trump and administration officials before the decision, The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Musk made the final call. The decision came after both Musk and Trump criticized Ukraine for attacking Russian diesel refineries.
"Elon Musk ordered the slowdown of a military-grade version of Starlink relied on by Ukraine, a decision that sparked panic in Kyiv and confusion inside the Trump administration," the WSJ wrote, citing unnamed US officials and people familiar with the matter. The report said that "Musk capped the speeds at which Ukrainian hardware could stay connected to the satellite-based network... rendering some offensive drones and interceptor drones virtually useless."
Elon Muskβs SpaceXAI is stuck facing a lawsuit over alleged data center pollution after Donald Trump failed to convince a judge that his Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has complete control over all Clean Air Act lawsuits and can dismiss any suit at whim.
Soon after unpermitted gas turbines were discovered powering Muskβs giant Colossus data center in Memphis, Tennessee, the NAACP sued. Its lawsuit sought an injunction requiring xAI (which, following a merger, is known now as SpaceXAI) to use the best available pollution control technology when operating the turbines and ordering penalties up to $124,426 per day per violation. Without such remedies, the turbines risked drastically spiking pollution in already vulnerable neighborhoods housing predominantly Black communities nearby, the NAACP argued.
To block the lawsuit, Trump tried to intervene, arguing that the EPA had the power to unilaterally dismiss lawsuits any time the president decides against enforcing the Clean Air Act. According to Trump, it would supposedly βnot serve the public interestβ if citizens were allowed to seek massive civil penalties to punish polluting AI firms that were trying to get data centers operational as fast as possible to support Trumpβs AI Action Plan.
Elon Musk said Tuesday that he would like to see the consolidation of his business empire by formally merging his two largest companies, SpaceX and Tesla.
"Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said of a potential merger. He was speaking during a question-and-answer period as part of SpaceX's third-quarter earnings call. Musk said, ultimately, it not his decision. "But at the end of the day the shareholders have to be supportive of this."
Musk's talk of a merger comes after a busy year in which SpaceX already acquired Musk's artificial intelligence firm, xAI, in February. In June, SpaceX went public with the largest initial public offering on record.
Tesla demonstrated a flying Roadster prototype and revealed three versions. See which buyers can reserve, how they differ, and what to check before paying.
Tesla demonstrated a flying Roadster prototype and revealed three versions. See which buyers can reserve, how they differ, and what to check before paying.
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