Anthropic Closes $30 Billion Round at $900 Billion Valuation

Anthropic is closing a financing round of more than $30 billion at a pre-money valuation above $900 billion, a figure that, if it lands as reported, would make Claude's maker the most valuable private AI company in the world. Bloomberg first reported on May 22 that the deal was expected to wrap up the week of May 26, with Sequoia Capital, Dragoneer Investment Group, Altimeter Capital and Greenoaks Capital Partners co-leading, each committing roughly $2 billion. Founders Fund and General Catalyst, both already on the cap table, are joining the round.

The number to keep in mind is OpenAI's $852 billion private valuation set in March. With this round, Anthropic moves past it by a comfortable margin. Anthropic's previous mark, $380 billion, was only set in February during its $30 billion Series G. In other words, the company has more than doubled its valuation in roughly three months.

What the money is for

Compute, mostly. Anthropic has been on a buying spree for raw inference capacity all year. We covered the company's $1.25 billion-per-month agreement with xAI for access to the Colossus 1 data center last week, an arrangement that on its face looked strange given the public friction between the two camps. With $30 billion in fresh cash, the deal makes more sense: Anthropic is buying every GPU it can find, regardless of who owns the building.

The company is also pushing aggressively into the enterprise, with partnerships making Claude the default model in Microsoft 365 Copilot, alongside a recent KPMG deployment to over 270,000 staff across 138 countries. That kind of footprint requires inference capacity the company simply does not yet have in-house.

What this says about the market

A trillion-dollar private AI company would have sounded absurd two years ago. Now there are two of them, and they are running close enough that the order may shuffle again before either files for a public offering. OpenAI, for its part, filed confidentially for an IPO last week, reportedly aiming at a public valuation of up to $1 trillion.

The structural question hanging over all of this: how much capital can private investors keep absorbing before the public markets start setting the price? Anthropic has now raised something north of $60 billion in 2026 alone. Neither company has shown a clear path to profitability that matches the size of these checks. The investors are betting that, eventually, scale solves the unit economics. The next year will start telling us whether that bet looks like Amazon in 2002 or Pets.com in 2000.