$518 billion.
That is how much computing power Anthropic has promised to pay for over the next decade. Its entire revenue in 2025 was about $4.6 billion.
Read those two figures side by side and your brain does a little flip. Either this is the boldest growth bet in business history, or it is the setup for the loudest crash. That tension is the whole AI bubble debate in one sentence.
This week, the debate got louder. Bloomberg reported that OpenAI and Anthropic count their “annualized revenue” in different ways, which makes the two companies hard to compare. SpaceX, which now owns Elon Musk’s AI business, is a public stock worth about $2.2 trillion. And Anthropic’s IPO is being talked about for as soon as November.
So I pulled the numbers for all three companies and put them in one place. Some are scary. Some are surprisingly reassuring. Not one of them tells the whole story alone, which is exactly why you need all 12.
This article is for information only. It is not financial or investment advice, and many figures below are reported estimates, not audited results.
Table of Contents
➤ Why the AI Bubble Question Is Everywhere Right Now
➤ The Quick Scoreboard: OpenAI vs Anthropic vs SpaceXAI
1. $2.2 Trillion: SpaceXAI Lives Inside a Giant Public Stock
2. $965 Billion: Anthropic’s Valuation
3. $852 Billion: OpenAI’s Valuation
4. $65 Billion: Anthropic’s Revenue Run Rate
5. $50 Billion: OpenAI’s Revenue Run Rate
6. $278 Billion: OpenAI’s Projected Cash Burn
7. $518 Billion: Anthropic’s Compute Commitments
8. $42 Billion: Anthropic’s 2025 Net Loss
9. $6.4 Billion: SpaceXAI’s 2025 Operating Loss
10. $1.25 Billion a Month: The Anthropic and SpaceXAI Compute Deal
11. $1 Trillion: Big Tech’s AI Spending Bill
12. 1 Billion: ChatGPT’s Weekly Users
➤ So, Is the AI Bubble About to Pop?
➤ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Why the AI Bubble Question Is Everywhere Right Now?
The tricky part is that nobody can say for sure while it is happening. Some analysts say the checkable warning signs would be hyperscaler spending slowing for two or more quarters in a row, or GPU usage rates falling. Neither has clearly happened yet, which is why smart people still disagree.
Want the backstory on how these rivals got here? Read our deep dive on the Anthropic vs OpenAI civil war first, then come back for the numbers.
What makes this moment unusual is that all three companies in this post are now pushing toward public markets at the same time. SpaceX is already there. Anthropic and OpenAI are not, but both are leaking numbers to investors almost weekly. That means we finally have real data to argue about, not just vibes.
The Quick Scoreboard: OpenAI vs Anthropic vs SpaceXAI
Here is the one-glance view before we go number by number. Remember that run rates are not the same as audited revenue.
| OpenAI | Anthropic | SpaceXAI (inside SpaceX) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Latest valuation | $852B | $965B | Part of SpaceX, about $2.2T market cap |
| Annualized revenue | About $50B (end of Sept, reported) | $65B (end of July, reported) | AI segment: $3.2B in all of 2025 |
| Big money worry | $278B projected negative free cash flow, 2026 to 2030 | $518B in compute commitments | $6.4B operating loss in 2025 |
| Public or private? | Private, no 2026 IPO expected | Private, IPO talk for as soon as November | Public since June 2026 |
Notice something? Nobody here is small, and nobody here is cheap. Now let’s open the box on each figure.
1. $2.2 Trillion: SpaceXAI Lives Inside a Giant Public Stock
Let’s start with the only one of the three you can actually buy today.
SpaceX trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. At its last close on October 9, its market value was about $2.21 trillion, and over the past year the share price has ranged from roughly $104.83 to $225.64. That high is more than double the low, which tells you how much even the market itself disagrees about what this company is worth.
The stock went public at $135 a share in June, and TradingView data shows it closed at $171.09 on October 5, which is about 27% above the IPO price but about 24% below its peak.
Here is the catch for our bubble question. That $2.2 trillion is not an “AI valuation.” It also covers Starlink, rocket launches and the other businesses Musk has stuffed into one company. Grok, X and the Colossus data centers now operate under the SpaceXAI banner inside it.
If you missed how this merger came together, our breakdown of the SpaceX and xAI acquisition facts covers the full timeline.
The bubble read:
This is the most “priced by belief” number of the three, because a public stock moves every day on hope and fear. A $2.2 trillion price tag with a 52-week range this wide is a market still guessing.
2. $965 Billion: Anthropic’s Valuation
Anthropic was valued at $965 billion after its Series H round in May 2026, when it raised $65 billion in fresh funding.
Let that sink in for a second. Only a year earlier, the company was valued at a fraction of that. Now it sits right below the trillion-dollar line while still being privately held.
The next step is the one everyone is watching. Bloomberg reported that an IPO could come as soon as mid-November 2026 at a valuation of around $2 trillion. If that happens, it would roughly double the Series H price in about six months.
Do the simple math (this is my own calculation, not a reported figure): $965 billion divided by a $65 billion run rate is roughly 15 times revenue. At $2 trillion, it climbs to about 30 times. Mature software companies have often traded at far lower multiples, so investors are clearly paying for growth that has not happened yet.
The bubble read:
The valuation is huge, but it is attached to the fastest revenue growth the software world has seen. Bubble or not depends entirely on whether that growth keeps going. We will test that in numbers 4 and 7.
3. $852 Billion: OpenAI’s Valuation
OpenAI’s last priced valuation is $852 billion, set in its March 2026 funding round. Here is the twist that quietly changed the story: Anthropic’s latest number is now higher.
OpenAI also completed a $7 billion employee share sale at that same flat $852 billion price in recent weeks. A flat price is not a drop, but in a market where everything is supposed to go up, flat is a signal. Reports also say OpenAI is aiming for about $1.4 trillion in a new raise of at least $30 billion, so the company clearly expects its price to jump.
Using the same rough math, $852 billion against a roughly $50 billion run rate is about 17 times revenue. That is lower than Anthropic’s multiple, which is the first sign that the market currently trusts one company’s story more than the other’s.
The bubble read:
OpenAI is still enormous and still growing. But for the first time, it is the one chasing a rival’s valuation instead of setting the pace.
4. $65 Billion: Anthropic’s Revenue Run Rate
This is the number that makes bubble skeptics pause.
Anthropic reportedly generated about $4.6 billion in revenue in all of 2025, which was a 1,088% jump from the year before. Its annualized run rate, based on July revenue, hit $65 billion.
The pace inside 2026 is even wilder. The company disclosed a $47 billion run rate in May, so it added roughly $18 billion of annualized revenue in about two months. A single quarter, the second one, reportedly came in at $11.5 billion in revenue.
Now the careful part. A run rate is a snapshot, not a result. It takes one recent month and multiplies it by twelve. If you simply multiply that $11.5 billion quarter by four, you get about $46 billion (my own math), well below the $65 billion headline. The gap is because July was bigger than the quarter’s average, which is exactly what you would expect during hypergrowth. It also means a slowdown would show up fast.
The product race behind this growth is worth understanding too. See how the models stack up in our Claude Opus 5.5 vs GPT-6 Sol vs Grok 4.7 comparison.
The bubble read:
This is the strongest evidence against a bubble. Real customers are paying real money, and the growth is not a rounding error. The open question is whether it can stay this steep.
5. $50 Billion: OpenAI’s Revenue Run Rate
OpenAI’s story here is strong, just a step behind its rival.
Its annualized revenue was roughly $50 billion at the end of September, and the company expects to reach or exceed $70 billion by the end of the year, driven largely by its enterprise business. That is a big acceleration from the roughly $40 billion reported in August.
Here is the twist you should know about. Around the same time, Bloomberg also reported that OpenAI and Anthropic calculate their annualized revenue differently, which makes a direct comparison messy. Some of the earlier higher OpenAI figures reportedly used Anthropic’s own counting method, so two numbers can both be “correct” and still not match.
So when you see “OpenAI is at $50 billion” in one headline and “$70 billion” in another, do not assume somebody is lying. They may simply be measuring different things.
The bubble read:
OpenAI is growing at a pace most companies would celebrate for a decade. But it is carrying a bigger valuation-to-revenue gap than it looks, and the way it counts revenue makes investors a little nervous.
6. $278 Billion: OpenAI’s Projected Cash Burn
This is the number that keeps bubble believers awake.
OpenAI has reportedly told investors it expects to burn through about $278 billion in cash between 2026 and 2030, mostly on computing power and infrastructure. In the same pitch, it projects revenue of $36 billion this year, climbing to $350 billion by 2030.
Look at the shape of that plan. It assumes revenue roughly multiplies tenfold in four years. That is not impossible, because Anthropic just did something similar in less time, but a plan like that leaves very little room for a slowdown.
The early numbers show how heavy the spending already is. In the first quarter of 2026, OpenAI reportedly burned $3.7 billion on $5.7 billion of revenue, which is about 65 cents of cash out for every dollar coming in. At that point it still held more than $73 billion in cash and securities.
Competition is the other half of this story. Our breakdown of the Google vs OpenAI AI race shows how many rivals OpenAI has to outspend.
The bubble read:
A $278 billion burn is only survivable if new money keeps arriving. That makes OpenAI the company most exposed if investor appetite cools.
7. $518 Billion: Anthropic’s Compute Commitments
Back to the number we opened with.
Anthropic’s draft IPO prospectus, which leaked in late September, reportedly shows about $518 billion in cloud and chip commitments over the coming years. That includes roughly $161.2 billion to Broadcom, $111.1 billion to Google, $110 billion to Amazon and $31.4 billion to Microsoft. About 80% is reportedly binding and cannot be cancelled.
Do the quick math (mine again): $518 billion divided by 2025 revenue of $4.59 billion is about $113 of future commitments for every $1 Anthropic earned last year. Against today’s $65 billion run rate, it is still roughly eight years of revenue.
Part of that comes from one huge deal. Anthropic’s April agreement with Amazon reportedly includes a $100 billion-plus AWS commitment for up to 5 gigawatts of Trainium chip capacity.
Why does this matter for the bubble question? Because commitments work like a mortgage. If revenue keeps climbing, the payments look small. If revenue stalls, the payments do not care.
The bubble read:
This is the number that makes the whole story feel fragile and powerful at once. Anthropic is betting that demand will grow into its promises, and it has locked itself in whether or not it does.
8. $42 Billion: Anthropic’s 2025 Net Loss
This is the number that makes skeptics point and say “see?”
Anthropic’s leaked draft prospectus reportedly shows a $42 billion net loss for 2025, on revenue of about $4.59 billion. The operating loss was far smaller, a little over $8 billion. That huge gap between the two figures means accounting items beyond day-to-day operations are doing a lot of the damage, so read the headline carefully before you panic.
The real cost driver is computing power. Anthropic reportedly spent about $1.60 on compute for every $1 of revenue in 2025. One analyst’s back-of-envelope estimate suggests the same ratio was above $6 in 2024. If that math is close, the company is getting dramatically more revenue out of every computing dollar.
Then comes the plot twist. Anthropic reportedly projected its first quarterly operating profit for the second quarter of 2026, about $559 million on $10.9 billion of revenue. That is a projection from investor materials, not an audited result, but it changes the shape of the story.
If the safety side of the AI race interests you as much as the money side, our breakdown of superintelligence extinction risk shows what experts actually warn about.
The bubble read:
A $42 billion loss sounds terrifying. A loss that is shrinking relative to revenue, from a company that may already be profitable on an operating basis, looks more like an expensive growth phase than a collapse.
9. $6.4 Billion: SpaceXAI’s 2025 Operating Loss
Now to the member of the trio that looks the most stretched.
SpaceX’s IPO filing showed that xAI, together with the X social platform, lost $6.4 billion from operations on total revenue of $3.2 billion in 2025. In plain English, it lost about $2 for every $1 it earned. The same report says more than 50 researchers and engineers left after SpaceX absorbed xAI in February, and that Musk urged patience, comparing xAI’s path to SpaceX’s own rocky early years.
The spending side is just as heavy. xAI reportedly spent $12.7 billion on capital expenditure in 2025, which was 61% of SpaceX’s total capex while contributing only about 17% of revenue. It also lost roughly $2.5 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone.
Here is the balancing fact. SpaceX as a whole reported $18.7 billion in revenue in 2025, so the AI division is being carried by real businesses like Starlink and launches. That is a luxury neither OpenAI nor Anthropic has.
Musk has made big promises about where this division is headed. We fact-checked them in 12 claims about SpaceXAI leading AI in six months.
The bubble read:
SpaceXAI is where bubble math looks scariest on its own, because the AI unit burns far more than it earns. But it is protected by a parent that has other profitable engines, which is a very different risk from a standalone lab.
10. $1.25 Billion a Month: The Anthropic and SpaceXAI Compute Deal
This might be the strangest number in the whole post.
Anthropic is paying SpaceX $1.25 billion every month for computing capacity at the Colossus data centers in Memphis, which Elon Musk’s team built to train Grok. That works out to about $15 billion a year, and the payments run through May 2029, adding up to more than $40 billion in total on paper.
Think about what that means. Musk publicly attacked Anthropic in the months before this deal. Now Anthropic is one of the biggest customers of his AI division. By my math, the annual rent is nearly five times the entire $3.2 billion that SpaceXAI earned in 2025.
There is a catch, though. The prospectus reportedly lets either side cancel with 90 days’ notice, and Musk wrote that SpaceX has not committed to leasing Colossus for years. So this is a huge number on paper that could shrink fast in practice.
Musk’s feud with rival labs is a story of its own. Our roundup of Elon Musk’s superintelligence quotes shows how his tone about AI has shifted.
The bubble read:
The bullish take is that demand for computing power is so strong that a lab will rent a rival’s data center instead of waiting. The bearish take is that the same deal hints Grok’s own demand never filled Colossus. Both can be true at once, which is why this number is so hard to read.
11. $1 Trillion: Big Tech’s AI Spending Bill
Every number so far has been about the three AI companies. This one is about the giants who build the buildings.
UBS projects hyperscaler capital spending of about $1.009 trillion in 2026, up from $492 billion in 2025. The bank’s forecast keeps climbing to $1.447 trillion in 2027 and $1.619 trillion in 2028, which adds up to roughly $4.1 trillion across three years. That is more than three times what the same group spent in the previous six years combined.
UBS also estimates that Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft will spend about 102% of their cloud revenue on capital expenditure in 2026. In plain words, nearly every dollar their cloud businesses earn is going straight back into building more capacity.
Other trackers land lower because they count fewer companies. Allianz’s research team, whose AI Bubble Risk Monitor read as moderate in March, put the five biggest US tech spenders at over $600 billion for 2026 alone. The exact total depends on who is counted, but the direction is not in doubt.
Where does the money come from? Mostly from the giants’ own pockets. A MUFG chart expects hyperscalers to fund about half of data center spending through 2028 from their own cash flow, with roughly $800 billion coming from private credit and about $350 billion from other sources.
That much hardware needs that much power, and your utility bill is part of this story. Read our guide on AI data centers and your electricity bill to see how it reaches your home.
The bubble read:
This is the number that reassures and worries in equal measure. The spenders are some of the richest companies on Earth, which is a cushion. But UBS itself warns that if demand grows slower than expected, depreciation costs could outrun revenue and squeeze margins.
12. 1 Billion: ChatGPT’s Weekly Users
Every bubble has a missing ingredient: customers. This number shows that AI does not lack them.
OpenAI announced in February that ChatGPT had reached 900 million weekly active users and 50 million paying subscribers. Since then, The Information reported that ChatGPT is nearing 1 billion weekly users, although OpenAI has not confirmed it and the milestone arrived about seven months later than the company had hoped.
Now the catch. Only a small slice of those people pays. Fifty million subscribers out of 900 million users works out to a little over 5%, and more than 5% is exactly how OpenAI described it. A giant audience is a great asset, but an audience is not the same as revenue.
Compare that to Anthropic. One tracker estimates it has far fewer users, around 245 million monthly, yet a bigger revenue run rate, because businesses pay it per use. The same tracker puts Anthropic at 32% of the enterprise API market against OpenAI’s 25% in the second quarter. Treat that as an estimate, not an audited fact.
Business demand is a big part of why companies pay for AI, and some of that demand comes from cutting costs. Our report on Big Tech CEOs’ AI job warnings explains the other side of that trade.
The bubble read:
Real, daily usage is the strongest argument that this is not a hollow hype wave. The unanswered question is how much of that attention can be turned into paid revenue.
So, Is the AI Bubble About to Pop?
Here is my honest read after going through all 12 numbers: it does not look like a simple “bubble about to pop” or a simple “everything is fine.” It looks like a very expensive bet where the risk is spread unevenly.
| Signal | Looks like a bubble | Looks real |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | Run rates are not audited, and the two labs count differently | Anthropic at $65B and OpenAI at about $50B are real money |
| Valuations | About 15 to 17 times run rate, with $2T IPO talk | Growth has been faster than almost any software company before |
| Spending | $278B projected burn and $518B in commitments | Giants fund much of it from their own cash flow |
| Customers | Only about 5% of ChatGPT users pay | Hundreds of millions of people use it weekly |
| Deals | A rental that can end with 90 days’ notice | Labs are renting rivals’ data centers to get capacity |
If I had to rank who is most exposed, I would put it this way. OpenAI is the most dependent on new money arriving. Anthropic is the most locked into fixed commitments, but it also has the strongest growth. SpaceXAI has the worst standalone economics, yet it is cushioned by a parent company with other money-making engines.
So what would actually pop this thing? Watch for these in the next 90 days:
- ✅ How Anthropic’s IPO is received if it lists in November, and at what price
- ✅ Whether run-rate growth slows for either lab in the next reported quarter
- ✅ Whether hyperscaler spending growth slows for two quarters in a row
- ✅ Whether SpaceX’s stock holds above its IPO price after the next earnings report
- ✅ Whether Anthropic’s Colossus rental gets cancelled or expanded
One more twist. If the labs ever really did slow down on their own, the numbers above would change fast. We covered that scenario in why Altman, Amodei and Musk want AI to slow down.
This article is for information and entertainment only. It is not financial or investment advice. Many figures are reported estimates or company-provided run rates, and they change quickly, so check current sources before making any decision.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
Is the AI bubble about to pop in 2026?
Nobody can say for sure. The strongest warning signs would be slowing revenue growth, falling data center spending for two quarters in a row, or a weak IPO reception. None of those has clearly appeared yet.
Which is worth more, OpenAI or Anthropic?
Anthropic is valued higher at $965 billion, set in its May 2026 Series H, versus OpenAI’s $852 billion from its March round.
How much revenue does Anthropic make compared to OpenAI?
Anthropic reported a $65 billion annualized run rate at the end of July. OpenAI’s was roughly $50 billion at the end of September. The two companies calculate run rate differently, so the comparison is not perfect.
What is SpaceXAI?
SpaceXAI is the AI division inside SpaceX. It combines xAI, the Grok chatbot and the X platform. It lost $6.4 billion from operations on $3.2 billion in revenue in 2025.
Why is Anthropic paying SpaceX $1.25 billion a month?
Anthropic is renting computing capacity at the Colossus data centers in Memphis. The payments reportedly run through May 2029, but either side can reportedly cancel with 90 days’ notice.
Is Anthropic profitable?
Anthropic reported a $42 billion net loss for 2025, but it reportedly projected its first quarterly operating profit for the second quarter of 2026. That projection comes from investor materials, not audited results.
Is SpaceX stock a pure AI bet?
No. SpaceX’s roughly $2.2 trillion market value also includes Starlink, rocket launches and other businesses, so it is not a clean read on AI alone.
Keep reading:
Explore our forecast roundup, AI 2027 predictions, to see where experts think this goes next.
See how the money story connects to jobs in our report on AI layoffs at Meta, Amazon and Block.
Learn about the geopolitical side in AI arms race warning signs.