Anthropic targets $170 billion evaluation as Claude drives new mega funding raise

Anthropic prepares for a record funding round that could triple its valuation.

The company is negotiating a $3–5 billion investment that could raise its worth to $170 billion.

Funding amount	$3–5 billion
Valuation target	$170 billion
Lead investor	Iconiq Capital
Other investors	Amazon, GIC (Singapore), QIA (Qatar), MGX (UAE)
Revenue (2025)	$4 billion (annualized)
Previous valuation	$61.5 billion (March 2025)
Purpose	AI, infrastructure, enterprise growth
Issues raised	Ethical concerns
Market ranking	#2 after OpenAI

In the closing days of July 2025, Anthropic has initiated advanced negotiations for a new equity round targeting between $3 and $5 billion in fresh capital. The draft terms project a pre-money valuation of over $150 billion and a post-money valuation as high as $170 billion—nearly three times the $61.5 billion valuation secured in the previous March 2025 round, which raised $3.5 billion led by Lightspeed Venture Partners.

According to documentation seen by investors, Iconiq Capital is positioned to lead the new round with a commitment of approximately $1 billion, while Amazon, MGX (UAE), GIC (Singapore), and Qatar Investment Authority are in various stages of due diligence for participation or scale-up of existing positions.

The size of this operation positions Anthropic just behind OpenAI, which, as of July 2025, holds a private market valuation of roughly $300 billion. It places Anthropic ahead of other sector leaders such as xAI ($24 billion, June 2025), Cohere ($15 billion, April 2025), and Mistral AI ($6 billion, May 2025).

The financial logic and competitive context behind Anthropic’s valuation surge.

Anthropic’s revenue growth and the unprecedented competition for talent and infrastructure.

Internal financial disclosures circulated among potential investors estimate Anthropic’s annual recurring revenue (ARR) at over $4 billion as of July 2025, quadrupled from $1 billion in January 2025. In the first half of the year, Anthropic signed more than 150 large enterprise contracts—each valued above $10 million annually—across sectors including finance, legal services, healthcare, and technology. The adoption of Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Opus models for workflow automation, document analysis, and natural language interfaces has been a primary driver.

Operating costs remain high. For the twelve months ending July 2025, Anthropic’s infrastructure expenses exceeded $1.2 billion, including long-term cloud commitments with AWS, and the company has doubled its research staff to over 1,600 full-time employees.

Gross margins are reported at 42%, impacted by GPU acquisition costs and rapid expansion of in-house data center capacity. Despite negative operating margins (-18% for Q2 2025), the company’s growth trajectory has prompted strong investor demand.

The ethical and strategic dilemmas of capital sourcing in generative AI.

Anthropic’s internal debate over the origin of new investments.

Internal communications reviewed by several media outlets confirm that CEO Dario Amodei addressed staff regarding the inclusion of Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. He acknowledged that while the principle of “no bad actors should profit from our success” remains a priority, the practical need to secure up to $5 billion in funding requires reconsidering earlier stances. The QIA (Qatar) and GIC (Singapore) together manage over $850 billion in assets and have intensified investments in global AI leaders in 2025, participating in rounds for OpenAI, Anthropic, and Cohere.

Amazon, already a strategic partner and infrastructure provider, stands to increase its equity position as part of this round. Its existing agreements include up to $8 billion in cloud credits and financial support, with Anthropic currently accounting for an estimated 7% of total AWS AI workloads by compute hour as of mid-2025.

Strategic implications for the AI market and Anthropic’s global positioning.

The second force in AI after OpenAI and the new oligopoly of frontier model developers.

If finalized, the round would set Anthropic’s valuation above $150 billion, second only to OpenAI in the private AI market. Anthropic’s enterprise contract book is expected to surpass $6.5 billion in annualized value by the end of 2025. The company’s top three clients (by spend) are major multinational financial institutions, each allocating over $100 million per year to Claude-powered legal research, document review, and compliance automation.

The influx of capital will enable Anthropic to accelerate research on next-generation Claude models and expand its dedicated GPU clusters, currently numbering more than 80,000 H100 and MI300X equivalents, ranking among the top three global AI compute fleets. The competitive pressure exerted by this scale has contributed to significant GPU price inflation and has prompted policy discussions in both the US and EU on potential oversight for AI compute markets.

The entry of state-backed capital, particularly from non-Western investors, signals a broader geopolitical realignment in the AI sector. In the first half of 2025, over $17 billion in new equity has flowed into the top five global generative AI companies, with more than 45% originating from sovereign wealth funds or state-aligned investment vehicles.

_______

FOLLOW US FOR MORE.

DATA STUDIOS

datastudios.org