Powerstack: Anthropic is building a moat of megawatts

Hope you have fun Halloween plans this weekend, but it’s also earnings season, so call it spooky season twice over. 👻

Speaking of the public markets, this week we’ve got the Anthropic S-1 analysis from our senior data centers analyst, Declan McCarthy, filling in for Mark. Currence clients can read Declan’s full breakdown of the S-1 on the platform here, with the supplier-by-supplier commitment numbers and project-level power risk scores for sites like Rainier, Colossus, and Monarch. Below, his take on what it means for the buildout.

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Anthropic made its S-1 public on 26 October, capping off a year in which it raised $141.1bn in capital and secured $832bn of compute commitments in lockstep. The company plans to list on Nasdaq as ANT, with trading expected before the end of November.

The financial press and the LinkedIn-o-verse have already spilled plenty of ink on the S-1's numbers. But here, we’ll recap and track the power current running through it.

Revenue is growing faster than compute cost, for now. Q2 2026 produced $974m of operating income, Anthropic’s first profitable quarter, as revenue grew more than twice as fast as compute cost quarter over quarter. The compute bill runs about $22bn a year, against more than $830bn in signed purchase commitments and leases that haven’t hit the expense line yet, and those contracts will cost an estimated three to five times what Anthropic spends on compute now. Anthropic generated $2.08 of revenue for every $1 of compute in Q2, up from $1.40 in Q1. Whether that ratio holds becomes clear in 2027, when most of the commitments start.

Four suppliers control most of Anthropic’s future capacity, but also compete with it. Broadcom, SpaceXAI, Google, and Amazon hold 79% of $637bn in named compute commitments (the remaining $193bn of the $832bn are unnamed suppliers). And two-thirds of the named compute total can’t be canceled. Amazon and Google are also investors, sales channels, and model competitors. That concentration gives suppliers more bargaining power over how much capacity Anthropic receives, what it pays, and the financing terms. It also makes Anthropic’s future compute costs depend more on Google’s TPU chips than on any other platform.

Anthropic is becoming a long-term buyer of data center capacity and power. Its “Anthropic Direct” model replaces renting through a hyperscaler. It is now leasing chips, contracting facilities, and securing power directly. Terms run up to 20 years, some on a take-or-pay basis. That lowers unit cost and adds control, but it moves capex, upfront lease payments, and site and power risk onto Anthropic’s own balance sheet.

Some of Anthropic’s capacity runs fully off-grid, like Nscale’s Monarch Compute Campus in West Virginia powered entirely by on-site gas, and Colossus in Memphis pairs grid power with on-site turbines. Anthropic passes those fuel costs through uncapped, and it pays above-market prices for turbines and electrical equipment to pull delivery forward, with no guarantee it avoids owing for capacity that still arrives late. On top of that, it has guaranteed up to $500m of a provider’s power purchase obligations and $800m of developers’ equipment costs. It lists clean energy (solar, wind, storage, nuclear, geothermal) as options that "may not be available in the quantities or on the timelines we require." It also says it will cover large load costs for ratepayers, and names state moratoria and pauses as risks.

Anthropic has moved from buyer of compute to developer of the power behind it.

The S-1 is blunt that Anthropic has been capacity constrained, and that its growth now depends less on demand than on how fast capacity comes online. That’s what’s pushing it toward Anthropic Direct.

It also shifts who holds the risk. In a hyperscaler deal, the hyperscaler finds the site, signs the utility deal, and carries the power risk, and Anthropic just pays for compute. In a neocloud deal, the host carries the power risk, and the contract can be exited if the host misses, so Anthropic doesn’t pay. In a direct deal, Anthropic contracts the site and its power itself. It gets lower unit cost and more control, but it also takes on the site, power, and delivery risk. At the direct deal planned sites, fuel costs pass through to Anthropic uncapped, it pays above-market prices for turbines and electrical gear, and it still owes for the equipment if capacity is delayed. That’s before the cost of getting onto the grid.

So the question is whether the capacity shows up on time. At Currence, we’ve mapped the data centers behind Anthropic’s compute deals, and we've scored each one on how likely it is to deliver, including whether the power is lined up. The further a site sits from delivery, the more likely Anthropic is carrying the power risk itself.

So why take all this on? Because Anthropic thinks capacity is becoming the moat. It warns that distillation, stolen weights, and AI-assisted research could make frontier models easier to copy. If that happens, the edge shifts to whoever secures compute at scale and at a reasonable cost. 

At the same time, Anthropic keeps passing efficiency gains to customers: Opus 5.5 cut cost per task by about 40% versus Opus 5, per the S-1. That keeps demand growing, but every dollar of compute now has to support more usage at a lower price. So far it’s working. Revenue per dollar of compute went from 1.40x in Q1 to 2.08x in Q2. That makes the $637bn of commitments a strategic asset as well as a liability, because they lock up the scarce input rivals would need to catch up.

Going public changes how that capacity can be financed. Now, developers, utilities, and lenders are its direct counterparties. Each of them needs to know which sites will get power, and when. A listed Anthropic with its own credit profile, and ideally an investment-grade rating, can raise debt directly and keep the margin a neocloud would earn. But there will be a lot more market scrutiny of its filings, and it comes in a month of delayed or pulled listings (Holtec, Firmus, Form Energy to 2027, SB Energy slowing its ~$50bn IPO on customer concentration).

I’m watching two things. First, whether Anthropic’s direct leases, Hawesville and Western Downs 1A, still currently just “announced,” move to construction on schedule. Second, whether revenue per dollar of compute holds near 2.08x as new capacity lands. A slide back toward 1.40x would be the first sign the power bets are outrunning demand.

Turbine, transformer, and on-site gas suppliers. Anthropic will pay above market to unlock near-term capacity, and it won’t be the only buyer doing so.

Hosts with an Anthropic backstop. Fluidstack, Nscale, and Lambda get guarantees on power purchases and equipment costs, which makes their projects easier to finance. River Bend is the strongest example.

Utilities and regulators. Ratepayer pledges and upgrade funding give them more leverage over where and how fast capacity gets built.

Neoclouds. Anthropic Direct turns customers into competitors for the same sites, power, and equipment.

Smaller data center buyers. These companies are bidding against the largest AI buyers for the same turbines, transformers, and pipeline capacity, and they face a rising bar on community pledges.

Lenders to GPU-backed neocloud projects. Anthropic’s GPU contracts with SpaceXAI, Nscale, and Lambda are the ones it can exit if demand slows, and those contracts are what the projects borrow against.

A quick read on the numbers shaping the market. The capex, the contracts, the regs, all anchored in the so-what.

$135bn // Meta raises the floor on its 2026 capex guidance, even as Q3 free cash flow turns negative for the first time this cycle. The company’s $34.91bn in Q3 capital spending outran its $32.79bn in operating cash flow, leaving free cash flow at negative $2.12bn against positive $10.63bn a year earlier. Meta is funding the gap with both debt and equity now, pushing long-term debt to $80.9bn and selling $37.5bn in new nonvoting stock five days after the print. Meta still has the capital to keep building, but it’s reaching further and paying more to raise it.

$9bn // GE Vernova buys Trench Group, a German maker of high-voltage grid equipment, closing late 2027. The buyer sells turbines on one side of the buildout and now adds bushings, instrument transformers, and other high-voltage components on the other. GE Vernova is paying a premium for scarce T&D capacity rather than waiting for it.

Up to $5bn // DOE’s conditional commitment to Constellation for nearly 1.1GW of uprates at Braidwood, Byron, Clinton, Dresden, LaSalle, Quad Cities, Calvert Cliffs, and Limerick. The loan also carries an option to finance future uprates at other Constellation plants. Constellation still has to clear technical, legal, environmental, and financial conditions before DOE funds anything, but federal debt lowers Constellation's cost of capital on a project class that Google's earlier 890MW uprate deal already validated on the offtake side. 

1,070MW // Google expands its Voltus-aggregated flexibility contract in PJM tenfold, running through 2040. The deal comes two weeks after Voltus closed a $225m Series D and FERC rejected PJM’s Interim Resource Adequacy Service. The deal has a 14-year term makes customer-sited batteries financeable the way a long-term PPA does for wind and solar, which matters in a market where batteries make up just 16MW, or 0.2%, of PJM’s registered demand response. The number to watch is what PJM actually credits this capacity for.

Explore more Signals on Currence here.

The policies, rulings, and company moves worth watching.

Permitting bill’s first vote nears. The Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act is set for a Nov 9 vote after the midterm elections, but Democrats are apparently split on pushing it through or getting more concessions. Already, offshore wind approvals, canceled DOE clean energy grants, states’ rights, and tribal consultation have been points of contention.

PJM refiles its reliability backstop plan. The RTO is resubmitting its Reliability Backstop Procurement after FERC found its cost allocation, transmission owner exit rules, and load-serving entity collateral requirements unjust and unreasonable, with DOE separately pushing PJM to base cost allocation on updated load forecasts. The refiling decides who picks up the tab for its 6.8GW backstop.

LevelTen opens a national RFP for powered land. The marketplace operator is running its first standardized process letting developers pitch sites to multiple hyperscalers and data center buyers in a single submission. Proposals are due 2 Dec, and participants get a market report showing how their sites stack up. 

DOE designates helium a critical material. It cites helium’s irreplaceable role in semiconductor fabrication and other advanced manufacturing, where global demand is outrunning supply. The US holds large helium-rich gas deposits, but limited refining capacity and long permitting timelines have kept domestic production from scaling, which were exposed amid the Strait of Hormuz disruptions.

The latest research, features, and data drops on the Currence platform.

Morpheus Research’s Fervo hit piece is a nothing-burger // Currence fact-checked Morpheus’s short-seller report against Nevada production filings, the USGS seismic catalogue, Fervo’s S-1, and state-filed contract prices. See what it found holds up and what doesn’t.

Voltus brings scale to BYOC // Currence traced Voltus’s 2026 build-out against a flat demand response market. See what Google’s 1,070MW PJM contract means for the sector.

Where the market is meeting, and where to find us

📅 RE+ // Las Vegas, Nov 16-19 // North America's largest clean energy event, covering solar, storage, hydrogen, and grid edge tech. Respond to this email if you’ll be there.

📅 SOSV Deep Tech Summit // Virtual, Nov 4-6 // A free three-day virtual event on breakthroughs in climate, human health, and physical AI, with 30+ sessions, including one moderated by our own Kim Zou. Register here.

📅 DERVOS 2026 // Brooklyn, November 5 // Join the DER Task Force for the fifth annual DERVOS. With the overall theme "Everything is DERs", it explores how the center of gravity is shifting toward energy resources that are closer to load and controlled by those who need the power. Register to hear all the unfiltered hot takes. Use code CTVC15 for 15% off.

In honor of spooky season, let’s go with Zombie by the Cranberries. Yes, we already featured Dreams last month, but the Cranberries don’t miss.

Full Powerstack B-Sides on Spotify.

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