US stocks closed higher on Monday after two weeks of declines, with the S&P 500 and Nasdaq lifted by optimism around AI companies. Anthropic disclosed steep losses and rapid revenue growth in its filing for a US initial public offering. Semiconductor firms helped drive the gains, while Meta plans to raise up to $US95 billion in equity to fund its AI expansion. Investors are watching the Federal Reserve's policy statement on Wednesday and a busy week of earnings reports.
AI company Anthropic has reported a net loss of more than $114 billion in the first half of the year, according to a draft prospectus for its planned share listing cited by the Wall Street Journal. The loss was driven by $103 billion in accounting charges linked to changes in the value of financial instruments the company issued to raise money. Anthropic's revenue rose to $23.3 billion over the six months to June 30. The company has also signalled it could spend up to $1.1 trillion in coming years on computing capacity.
Firmus Technologies has withdrawn its application to list on the ASX, abandoning a planned $7 billion equity raising that valued the data centre operator at $44 billion. The board said the offer terms would not reflect the strength of its business. The company now plans to seek capital from private markets. Market analysts said investors wanted concrete revenue and contracts signed by customers before committing funds. Firmus has two operating data centres, in Melbourne and Singapore.