May 28 (Reuters) - Anthropic said on Thursday it has raised $65 billion at a post-money valuation of $965 billion, as it aims to bolster computing capacity to meet growing demand for chatbot Claude and scale its products.
The new valuation after the series H funding round puts Anthropic ahead of OpenAI, last valued at $852 billion post-money in March, intensifying a fierce battle between the two for dominance in the rapidly evolving AI sector.
Anthropic's valuation has more than doubled from $380 billion in February, reflecting its swift rise as a leading competitor in the AI race and intense investor demand for stakes in frontier companies.
"Since our series G in February, adoption has continued to grow across global enterprise customers, and our run-rate revenue crossed $47 billion earlier this month," Anthropic said in a blog.
Anthropic's pursuit of private funding coincides with preparations for a public listing, according to investors and bankers familiar with the company.
Both Anthropic and OpenAI are planning to tap the public market, possibly as quickly as this year, to acquire the computational resources necessary to power their services and train new models.
Anthropic has struggled to meet demand in recent months, forcing it to institute usage limits during peak hours and incentivize off-peak use by offering more compute during that time.
Its latest round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with Coatue and ICONIQ as co-leads, among others.
Anthropic's strategic infrastructure partners Micron, Samsung and SK Hynix also joined the round, which comprises $15 billion of previously committed investments from hyperscalers, including $5 billion from Amazon.
Amazon had said in April it would invest up to $25 billion in Anthropic, as the AI startup commits to spending more than $100 billion over the next 10 years on Amazon's cloud technologies. This is in addition to Amazon's previous $8 billion investment.
(Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City and Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco; Editing by Shilpi Majumdar)
