"You must be be mad ...

 

Getty Images / Kevin Dietsch

In Where's the Beef?, yours truly waxed "poetic" about a cool 80 billion in losses, courtesy Anthropic, in the days leading toward a possible 1.5-2 trillion dollar IPO, something boggling the mind considering how much money Anthropic will be burning in order to build out data centers to enable grandma to make a better apple pie. 

To wit.

• Anthropic could spend up to $750 billion on computing power.
• $450 billion in noncancelable cloud deals over 7-10 years.
• H1 2026 net loss of $80.7 billion.
• Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Broadcom, AMD are involved in the commitments.

In essence, the $750 billion compute spend is mostly made up of massive, noncancelable

cloud contracts over the next 7 to 10 years.

It gets better.

New reporting by the Wall Street Journal revealed the mounting costs for the AI lab, which ballooned to a net loss of $80 billion in the first six months of 2026. Anthropic’s losses for the same period a year prior were $13 billion — still an eye-watering sum, but peanuts compared to its runaway spending this year (the WSJ called it “one of the largest half-year losses ever reported.”)

The bleak financial numbers come from a draft IPO prospectus viewed by the WSJ, which notes that the company’s revenue for the first half of 2026 grew by just $1.1 billion over the same period to $16.3 billion.

The figures add to the anxiety around how long the AI spending bubble can sustain itself. If Anthropic’s losses continue to mount at a rate far exceeding revenue growth, there’s simply no way the lab can dig itself out of the hole it’s burrowed for itself.

That would be bad news for the US economy as a whole, which now hinges almost entirely on circular AI investments and data center development.

"You must be mad" ...

The Cheshire Cat as illustrator John Tenniel depicted him in the 1865 publication

"But I don't want to go among mad people", Alice remarked.

"Oh, you can't help that", said the Cat: "we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be", said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

― Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Any questions?