AI-related stocks saw notable strength in Monday's US trading session, even as major indices remained relatively flat. The catalyst came from a Friday report indicating that Anthropic's preliminary second-quarter revenue exceeded $11.5 billion, representing a year-over-year surge of at least 14 times compared to approximately $787 million in the same period last year, alongside the company's first-ever positive adjusted operating profit. Although these figures have not yet been confirmed, they have significantly alleviated recent market concerns regarding returns on AI investments.

Anthropic's Key Data Points and Background

According to investor documents, Anthropic's Q2 revenue jumped substantially from $4.73 billion in Q1 to over $11.5 billion, bringing the first-half total to roughly $16.2 billion. The company had previously disclosed an annualized revenue run rate of approximately $47 billion in May. This performance indicates that enterprise customers are accelerating their adoption of the Claude model, particularly in coding and task automation scenarios, allowing Anthropic to solidify its position in the competitive landscape against OpenAI.

Anthropic is preparing for a potential large-scale IPO, and these figures are being used in communications with prospective investors. The data remains preliminary and subject to adjustment, but the emergence of positive operating profit is viewed as a significant milestone in the commercialization progress of AI frontier laboratories.

Market Performance: Memory and Chip Stocks Lead Gains

Within the Nasdaq-100 components, memory and related hardware beneficiaries showed pronounced strength. Sandisk advanced more than 9% after touching even higher levels intraday, Marvell Technology climbed approximately 5.8%, and Micron Technology rose about 5.4%. Other memory and optical-related names such as Western Digital and Coherent also moved higher in tandem, while the PHLX Semiconductor Index gained nearly 2%.

Space and related AI infrastructure concept stocks, including SpaceX and Rocket Lab, also posted notable gains. Overall, investors are interpreting Anthropic's robust demand as a signal that AI capital expenditure and inference/training compute demand remain strong, particularly benefiting the memory and storage segments.

Market Interpretation: Demand Validation Eases "AI Bubble" Concerns

Recent market sentiment has been divided over the return cycle of AI investments, with some investors worried about potential slowdowns in capital expenditure or underperformance in model commercialization. Anthropic's revenue explosion and shift to profitability provide clear demand validation, helping shift sentiment toward optimism. Memory stocks had already strengthened on AI-driven HBM and high-capacity demand, and this development further reinforces the narrative that "AI hardware still has upside potential."

However, it should be noted that the data has not yet been officially confirmed, and the broader indices remain influenced by macroeconomic data and policy expectations. Going forward, market participants will need to monitor Anthropic's final disclosed figures, the performance of competitors such as OpenAI, and whether cloud service providers' capital expenditure guidance improves correspondingly.