Anthropic Seeking $15 Billion in Debt Before Its IPO: Is That a Warning Sign or a Bullish Signal for AI Infrastructure Stocks?

The artificial intelligence industry is growing rapidly to meet historic adoption rates. To support this growth, data centers are being built as quickly as possible.

"The race to scale AI has triggered one of the largest infrastructure build-outs in modern history," concludes a report by McKinsey & Co. Over the next three years alone, the firm projects more than $7 trillion will be deployed globally to scale data center infrastructure.

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"Whether a build-out is successful depends on many nuances, including the availability of capital and energy resources," McKinsey Co. warns.

The world's current energy system is simply not designed to handle the massive influx of energy-intensive data center infrastructure expected in the coming years and decades. This has led to a surge in new energy projects, even for more speculative technologies like small modular nuclear reactors .

The availability of capital, however, is a completely different challenge. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, more than $240 billion in venture funding went toward AI start-ups. That's larger than the entirety of 2025. And that figure doesn't account for public markets, through which hundreds of billions in additional capital have been raised.

Now, Anthropic is looking to secure $15 billion in debt financing ahead of a potential IPO. Should the capital raise excite or worry investors? There are two things AI investors should keep in mind.

1. The capital intensity of AI isn't going away

Many skeptics have compared the current AI boom to the dot-com bubble. And while there are many similarities, the differences are critical to understand.

The biggest difference, perhaps, is that during the dot-com craze, much of the critical infrastructure had yet to be built. That is, most of the world still lacked access to high-speed internet services. There was also a lack of user access points.

Today, of course, high-speed internet access is nearly ubiquitous. And billions of people have an internet access point -- commonly called a smartphone -- directly in their pockets nearly all the time. That infrastructure, however, took decades to realize.

The AI boom, meanwhile, already has all that critical infrastructure in place, allowing it to grow more rapidly than the dot-com era ever could. But there still is an infrastructure gap. To realize the AI industry's full potential, a massive amount of data center infrastructure will need to be built, triggering one of the biggest infrastructure build-outs in history.