SAN FRANCISCO, May 20 (Reuters) - Anthropic is closing in on its first quarterly operating profit, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, as its sales eclipse the enormous costs to develop and deploy artificial intelligence.
In recent fundraising materials, the San Francisco-based startup apprised investors that its June quarter sales could reach at least $10.9 billion, more than double its $4.8 billion in revenue for the just-ended March quarter, the person said.
That will propel its second-quarter
operating profit to an expected $559 million, said the person, on condition of anonymity.
The Wall Street Journal reported the figures earlier on Wednesday.
Anthropic's financials underscore how demand for the lab's Claude AI has jumped, as software developers use the technology to handle their computer programming and some enterprises deploy its top-shelf model Mythos to unearth vulnerabilities in their code.
The profit is rare for an AI industry that is grappling with the technology's high costs.
One such expense, in the form of AI's voracious demand for computing power, was also disclosed on Wednesday in the IPO filing of SpaceX, Elon Musk's rival space and AI company.
SpaceX said Anthropic had agreed to pay it $1.25 billion per month through May 2029, in deals for compute capacity that now include both of SpaceX's AI training data center clusters, Colossus and Colossus II.
Either Anthropic or SpaceX can terminate the agreements with 90 days' notice, and fees would be reduced during the capacity ramp-up this month and next, the filing said.
Musk posted on X that SpaceX was in discussions with other companies about "offering AI compute as a service at significant scale," which would be a boost as its AI segment remains in the red.
SpaceX's AI segment lost about $2.5 billion from operations in the March quarter, on segment revenue of $818 million, its IPO filing showed.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dastin in San Francisco and Aditya Soni in Bangalore; Editing by Kenneth Li and Chris Reese)
