Anthropic posts $11.5B quarter, its first adjusted profit
A money day for the frontier: Anthropic finally turns an adjusted profit as it preps what investors expect to be a record IPO, and Nvidia's latest filing reveals a $50-billion-plus war chest of stakes in Musk's empire.
Anthropic told prospective investors it generated more than $11.5 billion in revenue in Q2 with positive adjusted operating income — its first profitable quarter. The number, reported by Bloomberg, is up from $787 million in the same period a year ago (roughly a 14-fold jump) and more than doubles the $4.73 billion it posted in Q1 2026. The disclosure lands as backers reportedly eye a $2 trillion valuation for a fall IPO that would be the largest on record, with Fortune noting the figure came in ahead of the ~$10.9 billion that investors had projected. The milestone matters beyond the balance sheet: a frontier lab showing adjusted profitability at this scale chips away at the "AI labs just burn cash" narrative right as OpenAI's CFO told investors its enterprise revenue has overtaken consumer. The catch, as ever, is the qualifier — adjusted operating income excludes the stock-compensation and compute costs that make headline profits possible, so the GAAP picture will still look different. We've been tracking the run-up — Anthropic courts investors ahead of a blockbuster fall IPO.
Nvidia disclosed it holds a roughly $21 billion stake in SpaceX, its second-largest equity position after Intel at about $30 billion at the end of Q2. The filing with the SEC shows 122.8 million Class A shares in the rocket maker, which went public in June; with SpaceX stock down to $140 from $170.86 at quarter-end, the stake is worth about $17.2 billion today. Nvidia's Intel position, meanwhile, is a monster return on the $5 billion it put in less than a year ago — worth about $22 billion now. The SpaceX stake traces to Nvidia's investments in xAI, which SpaceX absorbed in February, and it comes with a commercial hook: Musk said on SpaceX's earnings call that the company will run its AI data centers exclusively on Nvidia chips, with a "significant allocation" of Vera Rubin GPUs expected next year. It's the cleanest sign yet that Nvidia's balance sheet has become a strategic weapon — equity positions that lock in customers and deepen the Jensen-Musk alliance, with Alphabet and Musk himself still the far bigger SpaceX holders.
What to watch: Anthropic's S-1 — whether the $2 trillion talk survives a look at full-year numbers.
Does a profitable quarter change how you think about Anthropic's IPO valuation? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Bloomberg · Techmeme · Wall Street Journal · CNBC
