Anthropic is lining up more than $10 billion in bank credit, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg News, as the AI company gets ready for what could be one of the biggest stock market debuts ever.
Think of this credit line like a giant backup credit card for the company. Anthropic doesn’t have to use all of it right away — it’s there so the company has cash on hand if it needs it, especially with a huge public listing coming up. And banks want a piece of it badly, because helping fund this credit line makes it more likely they’ll also get picked to help run Anthropic’s actual stock offering, a job that pays very well.
Anthropic has asked its biggest banking partners to put in about $1.25 billion each, Bloomberg reported. A second group of banks is being asked for around $1 billion each. Smaller players hoping for a smaller role would likely put in $750 million or less.
Nothing is final yet. Anthropic could still decide to keep the credit line at $10 billion, or even bring it in lower, depending on how the talks with banks go over the next few weeks.
Either way, it’s a huge jump from what Anthropic had before. Right now, the company has a $2.5 billion credit line that runs for five years, backed by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Barclays, Citigroup, Royal Bank of Canada and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.
This isn’t the only big money move happening around Anthropic right now. Morgan Stanley is separately arranging a much bigger $15 billion loan for an Anthropic-linked data center project in Texas, with backing from Google. Of that, $14 billion is going toward a company called Nexus Data Centers, which is building the actual facility. It shows just how much money it takes to build the computer systems that power AI right now.
Anthropic’s sales have grown fast enough to explain the appetite for borrowing. By the end of July, the company was bringing in cash at a yearly pace of more than $65 billion, and Reuters reports Anthropic expects that number to reach somewhere between $190 billion and $200 billion by 2028.
All of this credit line activity comes as Anthropic gets closer to actually going public. The company has already filed private paperwork with regulators to prepare for a stock listing, around the same time as its biggest rival, OpenAI. Wall Street watchers think Anthropic could list its stock as soon as this fall. SpaceX did something similar before its own huge stock offering — it expanded its credit line to $5 billion first, using many of the same banks.
The timing works in Anthropic’s favor. Companies that have gone public this year have raised a combined $257 billion, not counting shell companies, according to Bloomberg data. That’s a sign investors still have a strong appetite for big tech listings, especially in AI.
Anthropic hasn’t said anything publicly yet about the exact size of the new credit line, or when it might be finalized.
