Anthropic Snags $2.5 Billion Credit Line as AI Demand Rises
Anthropic received a $2.5 billion, five-year revolving credit facility earlier this week to pay for upfront costs as demand for artificial intelligence ratchets up.
The credit facility adds to Anthropic’s momentum following its March funding round, which valued the company at $61.5 billion, CNBC reported Friday (May 16). The funding will support the company’s rapid expansion and efforts to strengthen its balance sheet.
The AI startup behind the Claude family of AI models confirmed that annualized revenue reached $2 billion in the first quarter, double what it posted in the prior period, the report said.
Anthropic Head of Revenue Kate Jensen told CNBC in an earlier interview that the number of customers spending more than $100,000 a year with Anthropic rose eight-fold from a year ago, according to the report.
“This revolving credit facility provides Anthropic significant flexibility to support our continued exponential growth,” Anthropic Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said in a statement, per the report. “The backing of these global financial institutions is a testament to the strength of our business and the resonance of our mission.”
The credit facility saw participation from major global banks, including Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Citibank, Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan, Royal Bank of Canada and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, the report said.
OpenAI also snagged a revolving credit line of $4 billion in October, with an option to extend it by $2 billion, for a total liquidity of more than $10 billion, according to the report. The facility came shortly after it closed a funding round that valued it at $157 billion at the time.
During the announcement of its March funding round, Anthropic said it planned to use the investment to “advance its development of next-generation AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion.”
The company also said at the time that it plans to make further progress in its AI systems’ coding abilities and is focused on developing systems that “can serve as true collaborators, working alongside teams to tackle complex projects, synthesize information across fields, and help organizations achieve outsized impact.”
It was estimated this month that AI companies’ need for funding to build data centers for their models could require more than $1.8 trillion in funding over the next decade.
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