Anthropic Brought In Nearly $17 Billion Last Quarter and Slipped Back to an Operating Loss

Anthropic’s third quarter brought in almost $17 billion in revenue and still ended with an operating loss. In an amended IPO prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission this morning, the Claude maker put most of the swing on $5.0 billion of short-term compute, which costs it more than capacity bought under long-term contracts, and $2.0 billion in non-cash charges from its employee donation matching program.

Revenue for the three months ended Sept. 30 was $16.96 billion. That compares with $1.38 billion a year earlier and $11.56 billion in the second quarter. The operating line went the other way: a $567 million loss, after $974 million of operating income in the June quarter, the only quarter with operating income in the filing’s quarterly table. The original S-1, which WebProNews covered last week, stopped at June 30. Figures shared with prospective investors in mid-October had put the quarter at $16.8 billion.

Paying up for capacity it couldn’t wait for

Compute and infrastructure expenses reached $9.86 billion, or 58% of revenue, up from 48% in the second quarter. Anthropic says it usually contracts compute 12 to 18 months before the capacity shows up. When customer demand or research needs run past that pipeline, it buys short-term capacity at a higher price, and the filing says that will keep growing for now: “We expect our use of short-term compute to continue to increase in the near term and to in turn compress our operating margin and Adjusted Operating Margin as a result.”

The non-GAAP view held up better. Adjusted operating income rose to $2.5 billion from $2.2 billion in the second quarter, though the adjusted margin slipped to 15% from 19%. Price cuts on new model versions, along with contractual discounts, offset about $600 million of usage-driven revenue gains between the two quarters. The only other quarter-to-quarter change where the filing puts a number on price cuts came at the end of 2025, at about $70 million.

Most of the net loss had nothing to do with running the business. Anthropic lost $23.3 billion in the quarter, compared with $12.1 billion a year earlier, and $21.9 billion of that came from marking convertible notes and similar instruments to a higher company valuation. Total operating expenses were $17.5 billion, up 292% from the third quarter of 2025.

Fewer eggs in the top five baskets

About 79% of third-quarter revenue came from customers outside the five largest, up from roughly 64% in the first quarter. The top five still made up about 25% of revenue over nine months, and each of them spent a record amount in the third quarter. Sales through cloud provider marketplaces accounted for 44% of nine-month revenue, below the 48% the first filing showed for the half. Sales, marketing and partnership costs fell to 14% of revenue from 22% in the first quarter, which the company tied partly to new terms in its channel partner deals.

The bigger number sits in the commitments section, which the first filing left blank. Anthropic has signed purchase and lease agreements worth about $895.4 billion, substantially all of it for compute and infrastructure, the amendment shows. About $69.8 billion falls due within 12 months of Sept. 30 and roughly $447.5 billion before the end of 2030. A growing share runs through Anthropic Direct, its program for leasing chips and hosting them in dedicated facilities, which it says will let it backfill expensive short-term capacity with cheaper long-term compute as its own infrastructure comes online. It ended September with $146.6 billion of liquidity, including $95.6 billion in cash and $36.3 billion in short-term investments.

The amendment still leaves the price range and share count empty. The line for run-rate revenue as of Oct. 31 is blank too.

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Marvell’s $115 Billion Lumentum Deal Is a Wager That AI Networks Go Optical

Marvell Technology is betting $115 billion in stock that the copper wiring inside AI data centers is close to its limits. The chipmaker will acquire Lumentum, which makes the lasers and optical transceivers that carry data between AI servers, in an all-stock deal that values Lumentum at an implied enterprise value of $115 billion, the two companies said Monday.

Lumentum stockholders will receive a fixed 4.500 Marvell shares for each share they hold, which works out to roughly $1,132 a share. That is a premium of about 23.9% based on both stocks’ closing prices on Oct. 28, the last trading day before word of the talks got out. Marvell’s current holders will own about 67% of the combined company on a fully diluted basis, and Lumentum’s about 33%. Bloomberg put it among the largest technology deals on record.

Why a chip designer wants a laser maker

Marvell’s business sits on the electrical side of the network. It sells DSPs and other interconnect chips, network switches and custom AI processors, which it calls XPUs, to cloud companies that design their own silicon. Lumentum works in photonics: high-speed and high-power lasers, optical modules and optical circuit switches, and it runs its own compound semiconductor manufacturing, including indium phosphide. Marvell’s investor presentation credits Lumentum with the world’s largest indium phosphide wafer fab capacity.

The argument for owning both is that the next round of AI hardware will need them designed together. Optics already links data centers and the racks inside them, and the companies expect it to move into shorter “scale-up” and “scale-in” connections, all the way down to links inside a chip package. That is the territory of co-packaged optics, or CPO, where the optical engine sits in the same package as the switch or processor. “AI infrastructure is undergoing a fundamental architectural shift toward optical connectivity, creating an opportunity that comes along once in a generation,” Matt Murphy, Marvell’s chairman and CEO, said in the announcement.

Lumentum is growing fast on its own. In results released the same morning, it reported fiscal first-quarter revenue of $1.26 billion, up 136.5% from a year earlier, and forecast $1.575 billion to $1.625 billion for the current quarter. CEO Michael Hurlston said Lumentum landed its second major NPO/CPO win in the quarter, “backed by purchase commitments exceeding $5 billion.”

Put together on an annualized basis, the two companies have about $17.7 billion in revenue, $12.6 billion of it from Marvell, according to the presentation. Management puts the combined addressable market at $550 billion in 2030 and sees a path to more than $1 billion in yearly run-rate cost savings, mostly in cost of goods sold. The companies expect the deal to add to Marvell’s adjusted earnings per share in its first year after closing.

Where Broadcom and Nvidia fit

The obvious rival is Broadcom, which has long been Google’s main partner for custom chips and can sell a cloud customer a wider range of data center hardware than Marvell, CNBC noted. The two have fought over accounts before; WebProNews reported last year on Microsoft reportedly negotiating with Broadcom over custom Azure chip work that Marvell had been doing. In August, Marvell signed an agreement to supply chips that work alongside Google’s AI processors, worth up to $120 billion in sales through fiscal 2033, and in February it closed its $3.5 billion purchase of Celestial AI, a photonics startup.

Nvidia already holds stakes on both sides of the deal. It agreed in March to invest $2 billion in Lumentum, alongside a multibillion-dollar purchase commitment for laser components and funding toward a new U.S. fab. At the end of that month it put another $2 billion into Marvell through convertible preferred stock, as part of a partnership that brings Marvell’s custom XPUs into its NVLink Fusion platform.

Investors had cooled on both stocks while the talks were in the news. Since reports first surfaced late last month, Lumentum shares fell about 8% and Marvell’s about 22%, CNBC said, as a wider chip selloff gathered pace after Intel’s weak forecast.

Both boards approved the agreement unanimously. Murphy will stay on as chairman and CEO, and three Lumentum directors, Hurlston among them, will join Marvell’s seven-member board. The deal still needs votes from both companies’ stockholders and regulatory approvals the announcement didn’t spell out, and Marvell and Lumentum don’t expect to close it until the first half of 2028.

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