2026-11-11

OpenAI's First $10B Quarter Came With a $10.9B Loss - Anthropic's Revenue Is 1.7x Bigger and Headed for Nasdaq (ANT). Why Microsoft, Amazon and Google Stock Care

Written & reviewed by the TradeSmrt editorial team · 2026-11-11

In this article

What Happened
Why Two Private Companies' Earnings Are Moving Public Stocks
What to Take Away From This
FAQ
Sources

What Happened

Two numbers landed in the same week and together they explain a lot of what's been shaking Wall Street's AI trade lately. On Wednesday, November 11, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar disclosed that the company's third-quarter revenue crossed $10 billion for the first time - a roughly 50% jump from the prior quarter, up sharply from 18% sequential growth in Q2. Friar called it a "blockbuster quarter." The mix shifted too: enterprise revenue doubled quarter over quarter and now sits roughly even with consumer revenue, which co-founder Greg Brockman said made enterprise the company's single largest revenue source for the first time. ChatGPT's paid subscriber base also crossed 100 million for the first time.

The catch is the loss. OpenAI's adjusted operating loss widened to $10.9 billion in Q3, up from $10.1 billion in Q2. The silver lining is the margin: the adjusted operating margin improved from -150% to -109%, meaning OpenAI is now losing about $1.09 for every dollar of revenue, down from $1.50. Growth is outrunning the losses in percentage terms - but the company is still burning more cash than it takes in, and by a record absolute amount.

The same week, rival Anthropic put its own numbers on the table as part of its Nasdaq listing process. Anthropic publicly filed its S-1 on October 26 and later disclosed, in an amended filing, that third-quarter revenue hit $16.95 billion - up about 45% from $11.56 billion in Q2. That's roughly 1.7 times OpenAI's $10 billion. But Anthropic's operating result flipped from a $974 million profit in Q2 to a $567 million operating loss in Q3, and the company posted a net loss of $23.29 billion for the quarter - a figure driven mostly by stock-based compensation and related accounting charges rather than core cash burn. The filing also disclosed purchase and lease commitments totaling roughly $895 billion, almost all of it tied to compute and data-center infrastructure, with about $448 billion of that due before the end of 2030. Anthropic plans to list under the ticker ANT, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the offering. Valuation chatter has cooled from nearly $2 trillion earlier this year to around $1.5 trillion as of mid-October, and the exact pricing and listing date remain unconfirmed.

Why Two Private Companies' Earnings Are Moving Public Stocks

Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic trades on a U.S. exchange yet (Anthropic is in the process of getting there). So why do their numbers matter to anyone holding Microsoft, Amazon or Alphabet stock? Because those three companies own large, disclosed stakes in exactly these two businesses, and the money flows run in both directions.

Microsoft holds a 27% stake in OpenAI's for-profit entity, valued at roughly $135 billion under last year's restructuring deal. As part of that same agreement, OpenAI committed to buying an incremental $250 billion of Azure cloud services. In other words, a meaningful share of the money OpenAI loses every quarter ends up booked as Microsoft's cloud revenue. The Anthropic side is structured similarly: Amazon has built a roughly 21% stake through multiple billion-dollar investment rounds, while Alphabet holds about 14%, against a contractual cap of 15%. At the valuation levels now being discussed for the IPO ($1 trillion to $1.5 trillion), Amazon's stake alone would be worth north of $200 billion, with Alphabet's in the mid-hundreds-of-billions range.

That structure is exactly why this week's numbers aren't just startup trivia. First, every dollar OpenAI and Anthropic spend chasing compute capacity flows straight into the cloud revenue lines of Microsoft, Amazon and Google - the same three stocks that dominate the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 by weight. Second, how the market prices these two private companies directly affects the carrying value of the stakes their biggest shareholders hold on paper. Anthropic's valuation drifting down from roughly $2 trillion to $1.5 trillion implies the value of Amazon's and Alphabet's stakes has compressed by a similar proportion. Third, and most fundamentally, these disclosures are the clearest available evidence on the question that has whipsawed Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and CoreWeave shares over the past several trading sessions: whether the AI industry's enormous capital spending is actually converting into durable revenue and profit, or just getting bigger losses faster.

The two companies' trajectories also cut in opposite directions. OpenAI is burning more dollars in absolute terms but its loss rate per dollar of revenue is improving - a "losing money, but less badly" story. Anthropic has the bigger top line but just swung from an operating profit to an operating loss heading into its roadshow, which is a tougher story to sell to IPO investors and is one reason bankers and early backers have reportedly trimmed their valuation expectations.

What to Take Away From This

A few lessons apply beyond this specific pair of companies. First, private-company earnings aren't irrelevant to public-market investors just because the company itself isn't listed. OpenAI and Anthropic sit at the center of the capital-spending story driving Magnificent Seven valuations, and their disclosures feed directly into how investors model Microsoft's, Amazon's and Alphabet's future cloud revenue and the carrying value of their minority stakes. Second, revenue growth and loss trajectory are two different signals and should be read separately: OpenAI's improving loss margin and Anthropic's larger but newly-negative operating result tell different stories despite both companies growing revenue by roughly 45-50% sequentially. Third, enormous multi-year compute commitments like Anthropic's disclosed $895 billion figure function as a forward-looking map of spending that will flow to chipmakers, cloud providers and data-center operators for years - which is exactly why chip and AI-infrastructure stocks react so sharply whenever numbers like these surface.

FAQ

Can I buy OpenAI or Anthropic stock directly right now?

Not yet. OpenAI has not announced IPO plans, and while Anthropic has filed to list on Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, the offering price and exact listing date have not been finalized. Until an IPO actually prices, the only exposure available to ordinary investors is indirect, through Microsoft (27% of OpenAI), or Amazon and Alphabet (roughly 21% and 14% of Anthropic, respectively).

Why did Anthropic's expected valuation drop from near $2 trillion to around $1.5 trillion?

Reporting points to several factors together: the swing from an operating profit to an operating loss in Q3, the scale of the $895 billion compute commitment disclosed in the filing, and broader investor caution about AI megacap valuations after a volatile few weeks for chip and AI-infrastructure stocks. The final IPO price could still land above or below that figure depending on investor demand.

If OpenAI's losses keep growing, why does revenue growth matter?

Because the loss margin - losses as a share of revenue - is improving even as the absolute dollar loss grows. OpenAI's adjusted operating margin moved from -150% in Q2 to -109% in Q3, meaning each new dollar of revenue is losing less money than before. Whether that trend continues toward break-even, or losses simply keep compounding at a slower rate, is the central question investors in Microsoft's cloud business are watching closely.

Sources

This article is an independent synthesis and analysis based on the reporting below, not a reproduction of the original articles. For the latest figures and IPO timeline, please check the original sources directly.

⚠️ This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Market conditions change constantly, so please verify the latest data before making investment decisions.