Anthropic: Claude Disrupts the Market with Record Growth

⚡

Key Takeaways

1Anthropic saw its revenue increase from $1 billion to $9 billion between 2024 and 2025, reaching $44 billion in 2026.

2Claude Code, launched in 2025, generated $2.5 billion in annual revenue, doubling its weekly active users.

3To support this growth, Anthropic signed significant infrastructure contracts with Amazon, Google, and Microsoft.

💡Why it matters — This rapid expansion highlights Anthropic's reliance on its competitors' infrastructures, posing major logistical and strategic challenges.

A Rapid Growth That Exceeds Expectations

When Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, spoke at the Code With Claude conference in San Francisco on May 6, he surprised the audience with impressive figures. Indeed, the company's annualized revenue multiplied by 80 in the first quarter of 2026, reaching $44 billion. This growth far exceeds initial forecasts, which anticipated a tenfold increase, a pace the company had maintained since its inception.

Infrastructure Under Pressure

Anthropic initially calibrated its infrastructure for an annual growth of 10x. In 2022, revenues were $10 million, reaching $100 million in 2023, and then one billion by the end of 2024. By February 2026, revenues surged to $14 billion, then to $19 billion in March, ultimately surpassing $30 billion in early April. According to Semi Analysis, the current run-rate would exceed $44 billion, equivalent to $96 million in new revenue per day for several months.

Claude AI: The Engine of Ascent

The acceleration of this growth is largely due to Claude Code, a programming assistance tool launched in May 2025. This product alone generated $2.5 billion in annualized revenue since February. Software engineers were the first to massively adopt this technology, doubling the number of weekly active users since January. However, this popularity has led to slowdowns during peak hours and quotas being reached faster than expected, affecting clients like AMD, which documented degradation across nearly 7,000 Claude Code sessions.

A Frenzied Race for Computing Resources

To absorb this growing demand, Anthropic has signed infrastructure contracts at an unprecedented pace. The company secured a five-gigawatt agreement with Amazon, with one gigawatt to be delivered by the end of 2026, and five more gigawatts with Google and Broadcom starting in 2027. Additionally, Anthropic has secured Azure capacity of $30 billion with Microsoft and NVIDIA, and invested $50 billion with Fluidstack. An agreement with SpaceX for the entirety of the Colossus 1 data center in Memphis has also been concluded, providing 300 megawatts and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs.

Anthropic does not own any data centers and rents computing power from its own investors and competitors, highlighting a structural dependency. Each TPU utilized by Claude is a TPU unavailable for Gemini, and each Trainium used is one less for Amazon Bedrock.

Valuation and Future Challenges

Financially, Anthropic is negotiating a fundraising round of $50 billion, with a potential valuation of $900 billion, which would place it ahead of OpenAI, valued at $852 billion during its last round in March. Although the annualized run-rate is impressive, it does not guarantee actual revenue. An internal memo from OpenAI estimated that $8 billion of this revenue could be inflated by the gross accounting of cloud commissions. However, Anthropic's gross inference margins have soared from 38% to over 70% in a year, a rare sign of profitability in the sector.

For users, the immediate effect of this growth translates into increased quotas. Anthropic has doubled the limits of Claude Code on paid plans and removed caps during peak hours for Pro and Max subscribers. It remains to be seen whether the infrastructure can keep up with this ambitious promise.