Anthropic said on Thursday it has raised US$65 billion (HK$507 billion) at a post-money valuation of US$965 billion, as it seeks to bolster computing capacity to meet growing demand for its chatbot Claude and scale its products.
The new valuation after the Series H funding round puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, which was last valued at US$852 billion post-money in March. This intensifies the fierce battle between the two companies for dominance in the rapidly evolving AI sector.
Anthropic’s valuation has more than doubled from US$380 billion in February, reflecting its swift rise as a leading competitor in the AI race and strong investor demand for stakes in frontier AI companies.
“Since our Series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, and our run-rate revenue crossed US$47 billion earlier this month,” Anthropic said in a blog post.
Anthropic’s pursuit of private funding coincides with preparations for a public listing, according to investors and bankers familiar with the company.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are planning to tap the public market, possibly as early as this year, to acquire the massive computational resources needed to power their services and train new models.
Anthropic has struggled to meet demand in recent months, forcing it to institute usage limits during peak hours and incentivize off-peak usage by offering more compute at those times.
The latest round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with Coatue and ICONIQ as co-leads, among others.
Anthropic’s strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix also participated in the round, which includes US$15 billion of previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including US$5 billion from Amazon.
Amazon had said in April it would invest up to US$25 billion in Anthropic, as the AI startup commits to spending more than US$100 billion over the next 10 years on Amazon’s cloud technologies. This is in addition to Amazon’s previous US$8 billion investment.
Reuters
