Anthropic closed a $65 billion funding round Thursday at a $965 billion post-money valuation, the biggest private raise in the company's history and enough to push the Claude maker just ahead of OpenAI as the most valuable AI startup on paper.
Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue and D1 Capital Partners co-led the Series H, with each lead firm reportedly writing checks north of $2 billion. Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, DST Global and Fidelity also came in.
How much is actually new money?
Less than the headline suggests. Of the $65 billion, $15 billion is previously committed cash from hyperscalers, including the Amazon investment announced back in April. Strip that out and the fresh outside capital lands closer to $50 billion, which matches what was reported last month when investors were clamoring to get on the cap table. One firm reportedly offered $5 billion just for a meeting with the CFO.
Still a staggering number. But "$65 billion round" and "$50 billion of new money" are different stories, and only one of them made the headline.
The chipmakers in the room
One detail is worth lingering on. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron joined as strategic infrastructure partners. Those are the three companies that supply most of the world's high-bandwidth memory, the stuff that sits next to GPUs and increasingly decides how fast you can train and serve a model.
An AI lab taking money from the firms that make its memory chips is a hedge against scarcity as much as a financing event. The frontier race has quietly turned into a fight over supply chains, and the cap table now shows it.
About that revenue figure
Anthropic says its run rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month. Read that carefully: run rate annualizes a recent stretch of sales, so it is a projection wearing the costume of a milestone, not $47 billion sitting in a bank account. The Wall Street Journal reported the company expects a 130% revenue surge to reach its first operating profit, which would put it among the few AI labs not burning cash to stay alive.
Growth has come mostly from enterprise customers leaning on Claude Code, the company's coding tool.
Eclipsing OpenAI, barely
The $965 billion mark edges past OpenAI, which closed its own March raise of $122 billion at an $852 billion post-money valuation. The gap is real but thin, and both companies are sprinting toward public listings.
Harder to wave away is the speed. In February, Anthropic raised $30 billion at a $380 billion valuation. Barely three months later it is worth roughly two and a half times that. Either Claude's adoption justifies the markup, or investors are pricing in a future they cannot yet point to on a balance sheet.
Anthropic has signaled this is likely its final private round before going public, with reporting pointing to a listing later this year. The next number to watch is the one in an S-1.
