Anthropic told investors its annualized revenue run rate hit $65 billion at the end of July, up from $47 billion in May and roughly $10 billion for all of 2025. Bloomberg first reported the figure on August 17; CNBC, TechCrunch and Axios corroborated it the same day. The disclosure came nine days after Anthropic signed a six-year, $10 billion compute deal with Volta, a cloud infrastructure company that did not exist six months earlier. Together, the two events show enterprise demand for Claude running ahead of the compute Anthropic can secure through its established partners.
Revenue climbs sevenfold in a year
Anthropic's run rate was roughly $10 billion across all of 2025. It reached $47 billion in May 2026, then $65 billion by the end of July, a sevenfold increase year over year. Preliminary second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, up from $787 million in the same quarter a year earlier.
The update went to investors as Anthropic prepares for a public listing. The company confidentially filed a draft prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June, and a listing has been discussed for as early as September, though Anthropic has not confirmed a date. As of an earlier update tied to an April $30 billion run-rate milestone, Anthropic said more than 1,000 business customers were each spending over $1 million annually, up from roughly 500 in February. The company has not published an updated customer count alongside the July figure.
A $10 billion bet on a startup that didn't exist in February
Nine days before the revenue figure went public, Bloomberg reported that Anthropic had signed a six-year, $10 billion compute agreement with Volta, an infrastructure company founded in early 2026 by former Brookfield Asset Management managers. Volta raised $300 million in venture funding alongside the deal, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Altimeter Capital, with Nvidia and Michael Dell also investing. The round valued Volta at $2.4 billion before the company had delivered a single rack of compute. J.P. Morgan is arranging $1.3 billion in credit support to back the contract.
The compute itself will come from a 133-megawatt data center Volta is building in Tydal, Norway, in partnership with Bitdeer Technologies, a former crypto-mining company now operating data centers. The site runs on hydropower and is being fitted with Nvidia's Vera Rubin chips.
The Volta contract follows an April agreement in which Anthropic secured roughly 3.5 gigawatts of Google TPU capacity through an expanded partnership with Google and Broadcom, with delivery beginning in 2027. That capacity is still more than a year out. Volta's Norway facility, on a shorter build timeline, looks like a bridge for demand the 2027 capacity cannot cover yet.
Signing a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar contract with a company this young is a departure from Anthropic's usual infrastructure partners, Amazon, Microsoft and Google. It suggests those hyperscalers cannot supply GPU capacity on the timeline Anthropic needs to match current demand.
Meanwhile, Chinese labs kept shipping
While Anthropic worked to secure compute, two Chinese labs released major open-weight models in the same three-week window.
Alibaba unveiled Qwen3.8-Max on August 3, following a preview at the World AI Conference in Shanghai on July 19. The model is a 2.4 trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts system with 95 billion active parameters and a 1 million-token context window. API pricing runs $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens. Alibaba said the model ranks fifth on the LMArena text leaderboard and second on the vision leaderboard. The company also said it would publish the model's weights the following week, the first time a Max-class Qwen model has been open-sourced after several recent flagship releases stayed closed.
Eleven days later, Zhipu AI released GLM-5.3, which the company describes as the strongest open-weights coding model available. Zhipu's own benchmarks show a 50 percent jump in coding capability over the prior GLM-5.2 release, achieved through additional post-training on the same base model. On Terminal-Bench 3.0, the score rose from 4.6 to 28.3. Zhipu said open weights would follow on Hugging Face roughly two weeks after launch.
Neither release beats Anthropic's or OpenAI's largest closed models on every benchmark. Both are free to download and run, at price points closed labs are not matching.
What to watch
Three open questions will settle how this month's developments actually land. Whether Anthropic's confidentially filed S-1 converts into an actual listing on the timeline investors have been told to expect. Whether Volta can deliver usable compute out of Norway on the schedule its six-year contract assumes, given it has not yet switched on a single rack. And whether Alibaba and Zhipu ship the open weights they promised on the two-week timelines both companies set, since those windows close in early September.
Sources
- Bloomberg. "Anthropic's Annualized Revenue Tops $65 Billion Before IPO." August 17, 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-08-17/anthropic-revenue-run-rate-surpasses-65-billion-ahead-of-ipo
- CNBC. "Anthropic tells investors annualized revenue run rate climbed to $65 billion in July." August 17, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/08/17/anthropic-says-annualized-revenue-climbed-to-65-billion-in-july.html
- TechCrunch. "Anthropic's annualized revenue surges to $65B." August 17, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/17/anthropics-annualized-revenue-surges-to-65b/
- Axios. "Anthropic's revenue run rate reportedly surpasses $65 billion pre-IPO." August 17, 2026. https://www.axios.com/2026/08/17/anthropic-revenue-run-rate-ipo-openai
- TechCrunch. "Anthropic signs $10 billion deal with AI cloud startup Volta." August 4, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/04/anthropic-signs-10-billion-deal-with-ai-cloud-startup-volta/
- The Decoder. "Anthropic locks in $10 billion of compute from Volta, a cloud startup that didn't exist six months ago." August 2026. https://the-decoder.com/anthropic-locks-in-10-billion-of-compute-from-volta-a-cloud-startup-that-didnt-exist-six-months-ago/
- TheNextWeb. "Anthropic signs a $10bn compute deal with a week-old cloud startup." August 2026. https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-volta-10bn-compute-deal
- TechCrunch. "Anthropic ups compute deal with Google and Broadcom amid skyrocketing demand." April 7, 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/07/anthropic-compute-deal-google-broadcom-tpus/
- CNBC. "Broadcom agrees to expanded chip deals with Google, Anthropic." April 6, 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/06/broadcom-agrees-to-expanded-chip-deals-with-google-anthropic.html
- Anthropic. "Anthropic expands partnership with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of next-generation compute." April 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/news/google-broadcom-partnership-compute
- Alibaba Cloud Community. "Alibaba Unveils Qwen3.8-Max: Its Largest and Most Capable Flagship Model to Date." August 3, 2026. https://www.alibabacloud.com/blog/alibaba-unveils-qwen3-8-max-its-largest-and-most-capable-flagship-model-to-date_603420
- MarkTechPost. "Alibaba Qwen Releases Qwen3.8-Max." August 3, 2026. https://www.marktechpost.com/2026/08/03/alibaba-qwen-releases-qwen3-8-max/
- Yotta Labs. "Qwen 3.8-Max: Specs, Pricing, Benchmark Status, and How to Access It." August 2026. https://www.yottalabs.ai/post/qwen-3-8-max-release-date-specs-how-to-access-2026
- The Decoder. "Zhipu AI releases GLM-5.3, claims it's the strongest open-weights coding model." August 14, 2026. https://the-decoder.com/zhipu-ai-releases-glm-5-3-claims-its-the-strongest-open-weights-coding-model/
- Decrypt. "China's Z.AI Ships GLM-5.3, Calling It the Top Open-Weight Coding Model." August 2026. https://decrypt.co/375684/china-z-ai-glm-5-3-top-open-weight-coding-model