Anthropic is sitting on more cash than Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia, according to a new comparison of corporate balance sheets published by CNBC.
The AI startup, best known for its Claude models, held a combined $131.7 billion in cash and equivalents plus short-term investments as of its most recent disclosures, placing it third on the list, behind only Berkshire Hathaway and Alphabet. Of that total, $112.4 billion is sitting in cash and equivalents, with the remaining $19.3 billion parked in short-term investments.
Berkshire Hathaway topped the ranking with $365.5 billion in combined cash and short-term investments, the bulk of it, $324.9 billion, held as short-term investments rather than straight cash. Alphabet came in second with $242.5 billion, split between $55.9 billion in cash and $186.6 billion in short-term investments.
Anthropic’s position is striking given how young the company is relative to the rest of the list. Berkshire Hathaway has been compounding cash for decades, and Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Nvidia are all public companies with years of free cash flow behind them. Anthropic, founded in 2021, is still private and does not generate anywhere near the profits of the trillion-dollar tech giants it has now out-cashed.
Right behind Anthropic on the list is Amazon, with $123 billion in combined cash and short-term investments, followed by SpaceX at $100 billion. Meta holds $90.3 billion, Microsoft $76.8 billion, Nvidia $62.5 billion and Apple $62.4 billion. Tesla, Elevance Health, Oracle, UnitedHealth Group, Intel, MetLife, Centene, Micron and General Motors round out the rest of the list, all holding less than $45 billion.
Anthropic’s cash pile is a direct result of the enormous funding rounds it has closed over the past year and a half. The company’s valuation climbed from $61.5 billion in March 2025 to $183 billion by September, then to $350 billion in January 2026, and eventually crossed $900 billion in subsequent rounds, with investors including Google, Amazon, Microsoft and Nvidia all pouring capital in to secure a stake in the company behind Claude.
That capital has not all gone toward compute and infrastructure commitments right away, some of it is simply sitting on the balance sheet, giving Anthropic significant flexibility as it competes with OpenAI for talent, chips and enterprise customers. The company has also been scaling its business quickly, with Anthropic’s annualised revenue run rate having touched $47 billion on the back of strong enterprise adoption, a factor that likely helped justify the scale of its recent fundraising.
The table also reflects the growing financial muscle of frontier AI labs more broadly. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, another private company without a stock ticker, also makes the top five, ahead of publicly traded names like Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia and Apple. Five years ago, a ranking of the most cash-rich companies in the world would have been dominated entirely by established tech giants and conglomerates. Today, two unlisted AI and aerospace companies occupy spots ahead of them.
Whether Anthropic holds onto this position will depend largely on how fast it burns through cash as it races to build out data centers and train increasingly capable models, and on how its rumoured path toward an IPO plays out over the coming months.