Michael Burry Flags Complex Circular Financing Webs With Anthropic's Compute Liabilities At 12x Current Revenue

• Anthropic’s S-1 filing reveals approximately $537 billion in total compute and infrastructure commitments—exceeding 20 times trailing twelve-month sales.
• Major cloud providers operate in a closed-loop circular financing structure, acting simultaneously as equity investors in Anthropic. 
• Burry noted that current compute commitments are about 12 times current sales. 

Claude developer Anthropic’s IPO documents reveal a massive web of financial commitments, circular equity arrangements, and take-or-pay hardware liabilities that closely mirror historical infrastructure bubbles, according to investor Michael Burry.

Burry argued in a Substack post that the financial architecture supporting the company exposes the broader technology ecosystem to systemic vulnerabilities reminiscent of the 1998–2002 telecommunications buildout and the 1960s computer leasing era. 

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Anthropic’s Massive Compute Commitments

Burry highlights that Anthropic has locked itself into roughly $537 billion in total compute commitments, a figure that vastly eclipses its revenue base. 

This total includes $114.5 billion owed to Google, $110 billion to Amazon, $44.9 billion to Microsoft, and $161.2 billion in rack-lease obligations to Broadcom, alongside agreements with specialized cloud providers like Lambda and Nscale. 

When factoring in pending Google Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) capacity and potential arrangements with SpaceXAI and its entities, total obligations exceed 20 times trailing twelve-month sales and close to 12 times current revenue run rate, Burry noted. 

While Anthropic experienced explosive sequential revenue growth earlier in the year—posting 132% and 144% gains in the first and second quarters—momentum has cooled significantly in August and September, with monthly growth slowing to between 3% and 7%, highlighting the added strain on its books as compute commitments expand. 

Burry notes that Anthropic’s revenue per dollar of compute slipped to $1.70, down from $2.08 in the previous quarter, indicating early signs of friction.

Circular Financing 

A core finding in Burry's analysis is the closed-loop nature of Anthropic's capital structure. Major cloud providers—particularly Amazon and Google—act simultaneously as equity investors, lenders, hardware vendors, and distribution channel partners.

Out of approximately $141 billion raised by Anthropic, roughly $41 billion came directly from Amazon and Google via equity and convertible notes, with an additional $35 billion in notes remaining undrawn.

Nearly half of Anthropic's revenue (48% in the first half of the year) is billed and collected directly through hyperscaler marketplaces, making these tech giants responsible for 58% of Anthropic’s receivables, Burry noted.

Parallels to Historical Bubbles

Burry cautions that while this degree of connectedness and circular financing creates an illusion of security during an expansionary phase, it might tend to introduce fragility if market demand pauses or turns downward. 

Drawing parallels to past market cycles, Burry concluded that market participants are repeating historical errors by treating vendor-backed, debt-heavy infrastructure expansion as organic demand.

Retail sentiment around Anthropic on Stocktwits was ‘extremely bullish’ with ‘extremely high’ message volumes.

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