IPO Approaching, "War Chest" Expands! Anthropic Reportedly Plans to Increase Credit Line to Over $10 Billion

Recent reports indicate that OpenAI's rival, Anthropic, is building up its funding "war chest" ahead of its IPO.

According to Bloomberg, citing sources familiar with the matter, Anthropic plans to expand its revolving credit facility to more than $10 billion, possibly exceeding its previous target of around $10 billion. As Anthropic prepares for its highly anticipated IPO, several banks are vying to participate in this financing, hoping to secure future underwriting roles in the IPO.

This revolving credit facility is still under negotiation and Anthropic may ultimately keep the limit around $10 billion or even below. Under the current terms, the most active participating banks in the credit facility are expected to each commit about $1.25 billion, with the second tier banks at around $1 billion, and those with lower participation at $750 million or below.

For banks, the higher the loan commitment, the higher the typical fees earned. Ranking higher in the syndicate loan market often corresponds to more significant roles in upcoming IPO transactions.

If the final amount exceeds $10 billion, this will be at least four times larger than the $2.5 billion 5-year revolving credit facility Anthropic received last year. Banks involved in last year's facility included Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Royal Bank of Canada, and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. Previous reports revealed that Anthropic is working with three of these Wall Street institutions—Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and J.P. Morgan—to advance its IPO.

IPO Approaching: Banks Scramble for a "Ticket In"

The significance of Anthropic’s move to expand its revolving credit facility likely goes beyond providing the company with additional liquidity.

Bloomberg pointed out that banks are aggressively competing to participate in the expanded credit line, with one major reason being Anthropic’s increasingly strong IPO expectations. For investment banks, securing a higher rank in pre-IPO financing arrangements increases their chances of having a more prominent underwriting role in the future IPO.

This model is not unique to Anthropic.

For example, SpaceX expanded its revolving credit facility from $1.5 billion to $5 billion in May this year, and soon after pushed forward with a record IPO. Bloomberg notes that the banks participating in SpaceX's expanded credit line and those participating in its IPO were largely the same.

For Anthropic, this means that significantly increasing its revolving credit facility can be seen as part of its process of stepping into the public market and deepening financing relationships with Wall Street.

More importantly, Anthropic is facing an extremely capital-intensive AI infrastructure cycle. The revolving credit facility itself does not necessarily mean the company will immediately borrow the entire amount, but it provides a large backup funding pool to meet needs such as GPU procurement, data center construction, and other capital expenditures.

Another $15 Billion Data Center Financing: AI "Burn Rate" Enters the Infrastructure Era

Anthropic’s recent financing moves are also closely related to its rapidly expanding data center requirements.

At the end of July, The Wall Street Journal reported that a bank consortium led by Morgan Stanley was in advanced talks to provide a $15 billion loan to data center developer Nexus Data Centers, for the construction of a large data center campus and a 1.6-gigawatt natural gas power plant in Texas.

According to the report, the financing package includes a $14 billion bridge loan and a revolving credit line. Anthropic will be the primary tenant of the project, while Google plans to provide billions of dollars in financial guarantees for part of Anthropic's leasing and power purchase commitments to help lower the lending risk for the banks. Google is also expected to receive a roughly 20% equity stake in the data center and power project.

This means that the funds Anthropic now needs to raise go far beyond AI training compute costs and are gradually extending to lock in data center, power, and even chip supply directly.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Anthropic plans to secure at least 10 gigawatts of data center capacity over the next few years and has already signed more than a dozen preliminary leasing agreements with U.S. developers. The Texas project marks a shift from simply leasing cloud resources to directly becoming a data center tenant.

This financing model also reflects a growing trend in the current AI industry: infrastructure expenditures by AI companies are increasingly being carried out using the balance sheets of tech giants, chip manufacturers, and Wall Street banks.

Rapid Revenue Growth Provides "Backing" for Massive Financing

One of the most important factors enabling Anthropic to secure such large-scale financing before its IPO is its impressive revenue growth.

Data leaked last week showed that Anthropic’s second-quarter revenue exceeded $1.15 billion, nearly a 14-fold year-over-year increase. Meanwhile, reports surfaced earlier this week that the company has told investors its annualized revenue run rate in July has surpassed $6.5 billion.

Reuters later cited sources saying that as of the end of July, Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate was already over $6.5 billion, up from $4.7 billion in May; at the end of 2025 this figure was only about $900 million.

It’s important to note that $6.5 billion is the annualized revenue run rate, not the company’s actual revenue for the past 12 months. This metric annualizes the current sales pace, providing a better reflection of recent business growth, but it does not directly mean Anthropic will certainly achieve $6.5 billion in revenue next year.

Even so, the pace of Anthropic's growth remains remarkable.

When Anthropic announced it had raised $6.5 billion in May, it disclosed that its annualized revenue had surpassed $4.7 billion, making it one of the world's most valuable startups with a post-money valuation of $96.5 billion.

In just a few months, the annualized revenue run rate jumped from more than $4.7 billion to over $6.5 billion, giving Anthropic a very strong revenue growth curve to show ahead of its IPO.

From "High Valuation AI Company" to "Wall Street Financing Machine"

Anthropic is creating an increasingly comprehensive financing chain:

On one end, there is the rapid growth driven by products like Claude and Claude Code; on the other, there is the ever-expanding demand for compute, chips, and data centers. Connecting the two are bank loans, guarantees from tech giants, and IPO financing tools.

This proposed expansion of the revolving credit facility to more than $10 billion, when viewed alongside the previous $15 billion data center financing, highlights how Anthropic is shifting from an AI startup reliant mainly on equity funding to a company capable of mobilizing large-scale debt capital.

This shift is also fueled by a renewed surge in the overall IPO market.

According to Bloomberg, this year’s global IPO proceeds have reached $257 billion so far, excluding SPACs and other financial instruments, marking the highest yearly level since 2021. Prospective IPOs from major AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are becoming some of the most watched events in this IPO boom.

For banks, the race for Anthropic’s latest credit facility is more than just a lending business.

If Anthropic ultimately goes public, whoever ranks higher in pre-IPO financing arrangements could secure a more advantageous position in future capital market transactions worth tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars.

For Wall Street, the AI boom is spreading from “selling chips and building data centers” to “providing massive financing for AI companies’ capital needs”—and Anthropic is becoming one of the most representative cases of this trend.