Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI on Revenue, and Stripe Buys a Model Router
Updated: 6 days ago
Title: Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI on Revenue, and Stripe Buys a Model Router
Date: 25 August 2026
Type: Blog
Author: SAASiQ (contact@saasiq.ai)
Word count: 1398 words
Reading time: 6 min
Published: 25-08-2026
Anthropic took more revenue than OpenAI in the second quarter of 2026, according to figures reported by the Wall Street Journal, and on Wednesday OpenAI's chief financial officer told staff the company will be public in 2027. In the same week Stripe agreed to buy OpenRouter, a service that passes AI requests to whichever model a customer picks, and Nvidia agreed to pay Poolside $6 billion to license its model-building system. The cost of memory chips also reached shop prices, with Amazon raising US device prices by up to 60 per cent.
Anthropic's quarter and OpenAI's
The Wall Street Journal reported on 18 August that Anthropic's revenue for the second quarter was $11.6 billion, more than double its first quarter. OpenAI's was $6.7 billion, up 18 per cent from $5.7 billion. Anthropic also made a small operating profit, its first. OpenAI's operating loss, including stock-based compensation, widened to $12.3 billion.
The Journal put the gap down to slower growth in ChatGPT and continued take-up of Claude Code, Anthropic's coding tool. Its reporter Berber Jin said why the paper went to the quarterly numbers: "OpenAI has been tossing out a lot of vague ARR numbers, so we decided to take a deeper look." ARR, annualised recurring revenue, projects a year's income from recent sales. The Journal's figures are revenue for the quarter.
TechCrunch reported on 20 August that Ramp data covering more than 70,000 US business customers put Anthropic at 44 per cent of business share in July and OpenAI at 40 per cent.
OpenAI names 2027 for its listing
At an all-hands meeting on Wednesday 19 August, Sarah Friar, OpenAI's chief financial officer, said the company "will be a public company in 2027", or sooner if "our business continues to inflect", CNBC reported. The slides she showed staff had OpenAI's revenue run-rate up 35 per cent so far this quarter and its enterprise run-rate up 50 per cent, with its AI coding and work products at 20 million weekly active users.
Fortune reported on 13 August that investors expected Anthropic to float in October, at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would put its listing ahead of OpenAI's. Anthropic has not confirmed a date, so the October timing is reported and not announced.
Stripe buys OpenRouter
Stripe confirmed on 19 August that it has agreed to buy OpenRouter, three days after Bloomberg reported the deal. Developers send their requests to OpenRouter, which routes them to any of more than 400 models from over 80 providers. NVIDIA, Zoom and Lovable are among its customers.
Stripe did not disclose the price. Bloomberg reported more than $7 billion and the New York Times, cited by TechCrunch, $7.5 billion, of which TechCrunch says roughly $1.5 billion goes to the founders and $6 billion to investors. OpenRouter was valued at $1.3 billion in its Series B round in May. It keeps its name and product, and stays neutral between model providers.
Patrick Collison, Stripe's chief executive, said "Tokens are the central currency for companies building with AI", tokens being the small units of text that model providers measure and charge by. Alex Atallah, OpenRouter's chief executive, said no single model will be best for every task. Franco Granda, an analyst at PitchBook, told TechCrunch the deal gives Stripe "some degree of power over suppliers such as the frontier labs themselves, as well as hyperscalers."
The deal treats spending on AI models as a finance and procurement matter, which is Stripe's business. A VentureBeat survey of 107 enterprises, published on 20 August, found that 21 per cent had no real-time monitoring of what their AI agents cost, and 85 per cent used more than one platform to orchestrate them.
Nvidia licenses Poolside's Model Factory
Nvidia has agreed to pay Poolside $6 billion for a non-exclusive licence to its Model Factory, the internal system Poolside uses to build models, Newcomer reported on 20 August, with Bloomberg following the same day. Nvidia will also invest $1 billion at a $12 billion pre-money valuation and has offered jobs to 109 Poolside staff. The founders, Eiso Kant, Jason Warner and Margarida Garcia, stay with Poolside, and a letter to investors says the deal is neither an acquisition nor an acquihire.
The same letter explains why Poolside stopped training frontier models: "we had a 6 week window in which to raise $2 billion dollars to pay for a 40,000 GB300 cluster coming online in January. We didn't close it in time, and we lost the cluster." It plans to pay the $6 billion out to investors by the end of 2027, according to The Next Web, which counts this as Nvidia's third deal of this kind, after Groq and Enfabrica.
Fractile, the London chip company
Fractile, a London start-up that designs chips for inference (running a trained model to answer requests), is in advanced talks to raise about $600 million at a $6.5 billion pre-money valuation, Bloomberg reported on 19 August. In May it raised $220 million at about $1 billion, in a round led by Accel, Founders Fund and Factorial Funds. Redpoint and Lightspeed are lined up to co-lead the new round, and terms are not final.
The rise in valuation follows an initial agreement to sell Anthropic about $250 million of inference chips for delivery in 2027. Tech Funding News reports talks on larger commitments after that. Fractile's chips use in-memory compute, doing the calculation where the data is held instead of moving it to and from a separate processor. The company claims this is "25 times faster and one-tenth the cost" of current GPU set-ups, a claim that has not been independently tested.
Walter Goodwin, formerly a PhD student at the Oxford Robotics Institute, founded Fractile in 2022. Its seed backers include Kindred Capital, the NATO Innovation Fund and Oxford Science Enterprises, and Pat Gelsinger and the Arm veteran Stan Boland invested as angels.
Google's warrant over Marvell shares
Marvell has given Google a warrant to buy up to 58,970,907 of its shares at $206.58 each, up to $12.2 billion in all, exercisable until August 2033, Bloomberg reported on 19 August. About 1.4 million shares vest in the first year. The rest vest at roughly 240,000 shares for every $500 million of qualifying chips Google buys, and if Google reaches every threshold, Marvell's qualifying revenue could reach about $120 billion through its fiscal 2033.
The parts covered sit around Google's TPUs, its own AI chips: inference accelerators, storage, network and memory interface controllers, and near-memory compute. The commercial agreement behind the warrant was signed on 29 July. Marvell's shares rose almost 10 per cent. Broadcom, until now Google's main partner for custom chips, fell more than 5 per cent, and Google now has a second supplier for this silicon.
Memory costs reach Amazon's prices
Amazon raised US prices across its devices on 21 August, Fortune reported. The Echo Dot went from $49.99 to $79.99, the Kindle 16GB from $109.99 to $149.99 and the Fire TV Stick 4K Max from $59.99 to $84.99. The Kindle Paperwhite 16GB rose $40 to $199.99 and the Echo Show 11 rose $30 to $249.99, while the eero 7 and eero Pro 7 routers went up $50 and $100, to $399.99 and $799.99.
Amazon told Fortune it was "facing significant increases in memory and storage component costs. After absorbing these increases for as long as we could, we recently adjusted pricing." Fortune notes that Tim Cook called it a "100-year flood on memory pricing" when Apple raised its own prices in June. Coverage of Amazon's rises also names Dell, HP, Lenovo and Asus as raising prices on laptops and desktops. Fortune does not say whether UK prices have changed.
For buyers
If laptop and desktop makers are passing on the same component costs as Amazon, a hardware refresh priced before the summer should be re-quoted before it is approved.
On models, the Ramp figures put Anthropic and OpenAI close to level for business share. An organisation paying for both needs to know what each costs, by team and by agent, and that takes the kind of monitoring that 21 per cent of the enterprises in the VentureBeat survey said they do not have. OpenRouter, now to be owned by Stripe, is one way of routing between suppliers, and its terms and data handling should be read again once the acquisition completes.
Nvidia reports its second-quarter results on Wednesday 26 August.
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