As Anthropic's IPO approaches, CFO Krishna Rao faces a defining test

Anthropic has taken the first formal step toward going public, filing its S-1 with the SEC on Monday for a proposed Nasdaq listing under the ticker ANT. That puts CFO Krishna Rao at the center of a very familiar AI dilemma: the company is growing at an eye-watering pace, but the cost of feeding those models is still enormous.

The numbers in the filing are striking. Revenue hit $16.29 billion for the six months ended June 30, up from $1.16 billion a year earlier. Operating loss narrowed to $693 million from $2.14 billion. But net loss came to $80.75 billion, mostly because of a $72.39 billion accounting charge tied to changes in the fair value of financing instruments, according to Fortune’s reporting.

Anthropic was founded in 2021 and is led by CEO Dario Amodei. Its products include the Claude family of AI models, along with Claude Code and Claude Cowork. The company also raised $65 billion in May in a round that valued it at $965 billion post-money, a number that says as much about investor appetite as it does about the business itself.

Rao, appointed in 2024 as Anthropic’s first CFO, has made clear how central infrastructure is to the job. On the Invest Like the Best podcast in May, he said he spends 30% to 40% of his time on compute infrastructure and described the compute the company buys as “the lifeblood of our business.” Anthropic uses Amazon’s Trainium chips, Google’s tensor processing units and Nvidia’s graphics processing units.

That spending is not small. Compute and infrastructure expenses reached $8.95 billion in the first half of 2026, up from $2.33 billion a year earlier. Anthropic says it currently makes more than two dollars in revenue for every dollar it spends on computing infrastructure, though it warns that could change if it has to cut token prices. And that’s before the rest of the bill comes due: other expenses, contractual commitments and future capacity needs will all matter too.