Anthropic closes $30B round at $900B+ valuation, surpasses OpenAI

Anthropic closed a $30 billion primary round at a $900 billion+ valuation, led by Sequoia, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Altimeter — the first time the lab has eclipsed OpenAI's $852B private mark. Internal projections shared with investors put Q2 revenue at $10.9B, up roughly 130% quarter-over-quarter, with $44B ARR cited as the run-rate justification.

The round was paired with a $45B GPU compute commitment to SpaceX/Starlink-affiliated datacenter capacity, structured as $1.25B monthly payments through 2029. That deal alone exceeds Anthropic's projected 2026 revenue and is the largest single AI compute contract disclosed to date. Sequoia partners framed the bet as 'Manhattan-scale': funding the training runs needed for Claude Opus 5+ generations without renting from Azure or AWS frontier capacity.

Competitively, this leapfrogs OpenAI in private valuation just as OpenAI files its confidential S-1 (see separate story). Anthropic is now the highest-valued private AI lab, ahead of xAI ($200B range) and Mistral. Prediction markets immediately moved to 68/32 favoring Anthropic over OpenAI to IPO first.

The skeptical take: revenue growth is real but spending $190B in compute commitments to earn $45B in revenue with no profit path before 2028 is, as one HN commenter put it, 'close to the edge of a bubble.' The SpaceX dependency is also novel and untested — Starlink-adjacent datacenter capacity has never been delivered at this scale, and the monthly payment cadence gives Anthropic little flexibility if a training run slips.