Anthropic Series H: $965B Valuation, Past OpenAI's $852B

TL;DR

On May 28, 2026, Anthropic announced a $65 billion Series H financing at a $965 billion post-money valuation — the second-largest private funding round on record after OpenAI's $122 billion raise in March 2026, and the first time Anthropic has eclipsed OpenAI in a primary funding round, surpassing OpenAI's $852 billion mark from March 31, 2026¹²³. The round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital, co-led by Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN, and includes $15 billion of previously committed hyperscaler capital with $5 billion of that coming from Amazon¹. Anthropic disclosed that run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month, up from approximately $14 billion at the Series G close in February 2026¹⁴. Strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix joined the round to backstop memory, storage, and logic chip supply as Anthropic scales compute toward five-gigawatt commitments with each of AWS and the Google/Broadcom TPU partnership, plus full access to SpaceX's 220,000-GPU Colossus 1 facility¹⁵. Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 on the same day, putting the funding announcement, a flagship model launch, and three multi-gigawatt compute deals into a single news cycle⁶⁷.

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What You'll Learn

• The exact terms of the Series H — lead investors, co-leads, infrastructure partners, and how the $15 billion hyperscaler commitment fits in
• How Anthropic's $965 billion post-money compares to OpenAI's March 31, 2026 round at $852 billion, and what changed between February and May
• The revenue trajectory that justified a 2.5x valuation step — $47 billion run-rate as of mid-May 2026, up from approximately $14 billion at the Series G close
• Where the money is going: compute commitments with AWS, Google/Broadcom, and SpaceX totaling more than 10 gigawatts of contracted capacity
• The IPO timeline picture — what's confirmed, what's rumored, and what hasn't been filed
• Why the Series H, Opus 4.8 launch, and SpaceX Colossus deal all landed in the same window, and what that signals about Anthropic's commercial cadence

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The Round: Who Wrote the Checks

Anthropic's official Series H announcement, published on May 28, 2026, lists four lead investors — Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital — and six co-leads: Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, and XN¹. The participant list runs three deep beyond that and includes AMP PBC, Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, D.E. Shaw Ventures, DST Global, Fidelity Management & Research Company, General Catalyst, Insight Partners, Jane Street, Lightspeed Venture Partners, MGX, NTTVC, NX1 Capital, Situational Awareness LP, T. Rowe Price Associates, T. Rowe Price Investment Management, and Temasek¹.

The round also folds in $15 billion of previously committed hyperscaler capital, including $5 billion from Amazon¹. That $15 billion is not new money — it was disclosed earlier — but counting it inside the Series H tallies the headline figure. The same announcement adds Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix as strategic infrastructure investors, the first time chip-supply-chain partners have appeared in an Anthropic financing¹.

Why $965 Billion Tops OpenAI

OpenAI closed its own funding round at a $852 billion post-money valuation on March 31, 2026, raising $122 billion in what was the largest private fundraise in history at the time²³. Amazon contributed $50 billion to that round (with $35 billion contingent on an IPO or an AGI milestone), Nvidia and SoftBank each put in $30 billion, and OpenAI raised an additional $3 billion from individual investors through bank channels³⁸.

Anthropic's $965 billion mark is $113 billion above OpenAI's $852 billion. Bloomberg and CNBC both framed the Series H as the moment Anthropic eclipsed OpenAI as the world's most valuable AI startup in a primary funding round — the first time the company has held that title from a priced round, though secondary-market trades had implied a roughly $1 trillion valuation for Anthropic in late April 2026 against illiquid minority stakes²³⁹¹⁰.

The lead from OpenAI's valuation is narrow in percentage terms (about 13%), but the trajectory is what's notable. Anthropic priced its Series F in September 2025 at $183 billion post-money on a $13 billion raise¹¹. The Series G in February 2026 came in at $380 billion post-money on a $30 billion raise¹². May 28's Series H lands at $965 billion on $65 billion. That's a 5.3x valuation multiple in nine months, with the last step alone clocking in at roughly 2.5x.

Revenue: Why the Step-Up Held

The valuation step-up is anchored by run-rate revenue. Anthropic disclosed in the Series H announcement that run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier in May 2026¹. At the Series G close in February, that figure was approximately $14 billion¹². The trajectory across the public disclosures lines up like this^1111213:

Date	Run-rate revenue	Funding round	Post-money
Aug 2025	$5 billion	—	—
Sep 2025	—	Series F: $13B	$183B
Feb 2026	$14 billion	Series G: $30B	$380B
Apr 2026	$30 billion	—	—
May 2026	$47 billion	Series H: $65B	$965B

For comparison, OpenAI's most recently disclosed run rate sat at approximately $2 billion per month (roughly $24 billion annualized) as of Q1 2026¹⁴¹⁵. Anthropic's $47 billion run rate is now close to 2x OpenAI's last disclosed figure, though OpenAI is a private company and its current monthly numbers are not public.

The Same-Day Stack: Opus 4.8 and Compute Deals

The Series H announcement did not land in isolation. On the same day, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 4.8 — a flagship model upgrade that hit 88.6% on SWE-bench Verified and 69.2% on SWE-bench Pro, with a 3x cheaper fast mode and a new dynamic workflows feature in Claude Code⁶⁷. The Series H announcement also recapped a stack of compute deals signed in the prior weeks¹:

• An AWS agreement for up to 5 gigawatts of new capacity, with AWS continuing as Anthropic's primary cloud provider and training partner
• A Google/Broadcom agreement for 5 gigawatts of next-generation TPU capacity
• A SpaceX agreement for access to GPU capacity in Colossus 1 and Colossus 2

The SpaceX piece is the most unusual. On May 6, 2026, Anthropic signed for full computing access to SpaceX's Colossus 1 facility in Memphis — over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs and 300 megawatts of capacity¹⁶¹⁷. The Colossus 1 supercomputer was originally built for xAI, which has since moved its own training to Colossus 2, leaving Colossus 1 underutilized and available to Anthropic¹⁷. SpaceX retains the right to reclaim the compute if Anthropic's models cause harm — a clause that's drawn its own commentary¹⁷.

The result is that Anthropic is now the first frontier-model company to publicly run on all three of the world's largest cloud platforms — AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure — and the only one with direct access to SpaceX's GPU footprint¹.

The IPO Question

Anthropic has not filed an S-1, has not set a ticker, and has not announced a listing date as of May 28, 2026¹⁸. What is publicly known is narrower: Wilson Sonsini has been retained for IPO preparation, talks with Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley have been reported, and the offering is expected to target a raise of more than $60 billion¹⁸¹⁹. Multiple outlets have flagged October 2026 as the likeliest window, but Anthropic itself has not confirmed any timeline¹⁸¹⁹.

The Series H reads as a pre-IPO recapitalization. The investor mix — Capital Group, Fidelity, T. Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford, GIC, Temasek — is heavily weighted toward institutional public-market investors of the kind that typically anchor IPO allocations. The presence of memory and storage suppliers (Micron, Samsung, SK hynix) on the cap table is harder to read as anything other than a supply-chain commitment ahead of a major scaling phase.

Comparing the AI Cap Stack

Putting the two valuations next to each other clarifies how the AI lab market currently sits^123111214:

Metric	Anthropic	OpenAI
Most recent post-money	$965B (May 28, 2026)	$852B (March 31, 2026)
Most recent raise	$65B Series H	$122B (round name not disclosed)
Most recent disclosed ARR	$47B run-rate (May 2026)	~$24-25B annualized (Q1 2026)
Lead investors (latest round)	Altimeter, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia	Amazon ($50B), Nvidia ($30B), SoftBank ($30B)
IPO filing	None as of May 28, 2026	Confidential S-1 filed May 22, 202620

Both companies are private and both raised capital in 2026 at a scale unprecedented in venture history before this cycle. OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC on May 22, 2026, while Anthropic has not filed²⁰. The Series H makes Anthropic the larger of the two on paper for the first time, but the gap is small enough that the ranking could flip again the next time OpenAI prices a round or once OpenAI's IPO actually prints.

What Changed Since February

The Series G in February valued Anthropic at $380 billion on $14 billion of run-rate revenue. Three months later, the Series H values Anthropic at $965 billion on $47 billion of run-rate revenue. The revenue multiple compressed from ~27x to ~21x, which is the part of the math that lets institutional investors put $65 billion to work without the headline valuation looking detached from the operating business.

The Series H press release explicitly ties the use of proceeds to three things: safety and interpretability research, compute expansion, and product investment¹. The compute piece is the most legible — 10+ gigawatts of contracted capacity across AWS, Google, and SpaceX absorbs a large fraction of the proceeds before the new money even hits the balance sheet.

The Bottom Line

The Series H is the second-largest single private financing round on record (behind OpenAI's $122 billion in March) and the first time Anthropic has priced above OpenAI. The $47 billion run-rate and the 10+ gigawatts of contracted compute give the valuation an operating story that's harder to dismiss than the headline number alone suggests. Whether the ranking holds depends on what OpenAI's confidentially filed S-1 reveals when it goes public, whether Anthropic files its own S-1, and whether the enterprise revenue trajectory that justified May 28's step-up continues through the second half of the year.

Related reading on NerdLevelTech: Claude Opus 4.8 launched the same day with dynamic workflows and a 3x cheaper fast mode, and Gemini 3.5 Flash shows how the other side of the frontier-model market is repricing capability against cost.

Footnotes

1. Anthropic, "Anthropic raises $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation," anthropic.com/news/series-h, May 28, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³ ↩¹⁴ ↩¹⁵ ↩¹⁶ ↩¹⁷

2. Bloomberg, "Anthropic's Valuation Nears $1 Trillion After Raising $65 Billion," bloomberg.com, May 28, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

3. CNBC, "Anthropic tops OpenAI as most valuable AI startup, nears $1 trillion valuation in latest round," cnbc.com, May 28, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

4. SaaStr, "Anthropic Just Hit $14 Billion in ARR. Up From $1 Billion Just 14 Months Ago," saastr.com, February 2026. ↩

5. NVIDIA, "Microsoft, NVIDIA and Anthropic Announce Strategic Partnerships," blogs.nvidia.com, November 2025. ↩

6. Anthropic, "Introducing Claude Opus 4.8," anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-8, May 28, 2026. ↩ ↩²

7. VentureBeat, "Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 is here with 3X cheaper fast mode and near-Mythos level alignment," venturebeat.com, May 28, 2026. ↩ ↩²

8. OpenAI, "OpenAI raises $122 billion to accelerate the next phase of AI," openai.com, March 31, 2026. ↩

9. Axios, "Anthropic tops OpenAI as most valuable AI startup, with $965B valuation," axios.com, May 28, 2026. ↩

10. Yahoo Finance, "Anthropic Beats OpenAI on Secondary Markets With $1 Trillion Implied Valuation," finance.yahoo.com, April 2026. ↩ ↩²

11. Anthropic, "Anthropic raises $13B Series F at $183B post-money valuation," anthropic.com, September 2, 2025. ↩ ↩² ↩³

12. Anthropic, "Anthropic raises $30 billion in Series G funding at $380 billion post-money valuation," anthropic.com, February 12, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

13. PYMNTS, "Anthropic Hits $30 Billion Run Rate as Enterprise Demand Accelerates," pymnts.com, April 2026. ↩

14. Sacra, "OpenAI revenue, valuation & funding," sacra.com, Q1 2026. ↩ ↩²

15. CallSphere, "OpenAI revenue run-rate — April 2026 read," callsphere.ai, April 2026. ↩

16. Anthropic, "Higher usage limits for Claude and a compute deal with SpaceX," anthropic.com/news/higher-limits-spacex, May 6, 2026. ↩ ↩²

17. The New Stack, "Anthropic recruited SpaceX's 220,000-GPU Colossus 1 to fix what Claude users kept complaining about," thenewstack.io, May 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

18. IPOs.fyi, "Anthropic IPO Expected in 2026: Stock, Timeline & Key Details," ipos.fyi, May 8, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

19. The Tech Portal, "Anthropic targets IPO as early as October 2026, eyes over $60 billion raise: Report," thetechportal.com, March 27, 2026. ↩ ↩² ↩³

20. CNBC, "OpenAI to confidentially file for IPO as soon as Friday: Source," cnbc.com, May 20, 2026. ↩ ↩²