Invest1 publisher3 min readPublished
Nvidia would anchor Anthropic's IPO with a tenth of the $100 billion on offer
Reuters says Anthropic is discussing a listing that would raise up to $100 billion at about $2 trillion, roughly double May's private mark, with Nvidia weighing $10 billion of the book. The raise sells about 5 percent of the company.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- Reuters, citing two people familiar with the matter, says Anthropic is in talks to bring Nvidia in as an anchor investor in what could become the largest initial public offering in history.
- The company is seeking as much as $100 billion at a valuation of around $2 trillion, with Nvidia considering an investment of as much as $10 billion in the offering.
- In April the company committed more than $100 billion over a decade to Amazon's AWS while using more than a million Trainium2 chips, and it has agreed with Google and Broadcom to add gigawatts of TPU capacity.
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Why it matters
- decision Anyone taking the book has to decide whether to pay about 31 times a July run rate, or about ten times a 2028 revenue figure the company projects itself.
- exposure Nvidia would be holding up to $20 billion of equity in a customer whose $30 billion of Azure purchases run on Nvidia chips, so the anchor position and the order book move together.
- constraint With about 5 percent floated, the $2 trillion mark is set by whoever buys the smaller slice, and the remaining 95 percent never changes hands in this deal.
- precedent Arm lined up Nvidia and Amazon as anchors and SpaceX had Saudi Arabia's PIF; a supplier anchoring its own customer's mega-listing becomes the expected way these books get built.
A $100 billion raise priced at a $2 trillion valuation sells about 5 percent of Anthropic [2][1], and Nvidia's contemplated $10 billion would be a tenth of that book [3][2]. Anchor investors commit to a set portion of an offering before it is marketed more broadly [5]. Reuters attributed the talks to two people familiar with the matter and said the plans remain under discussion [1][4].
Nvidia has been at this size before. In November 2025 it said it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as part of a broader partnership. Under that agreement, Anthropic committed to buy $30 billion of Microsoft Azure capacity powered by Nvidia chips [7][8]. Anthropic relies heavily on Nvidia GPUs and is at the same time diversifying its chip suppliers as demand for Claude strains its capacity [18]. A second $10 billion at the listing would take the chipmaker's committed equity to as much as $20 billion, against purchase commitments one and a half times that size pointed back at its own silicon [8][9].
Two trillion dollars is about 31 times an annualised revenue run rate. Anthropic says that run rate passed $65 billion at the end of July, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, or roughly sevenfold in seven months [15][4][7]. It is about 2.1 times the $965 billion post-money valuation the company carried after May's $65 billion round [14][3]. It also leans on company projections of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion of 2028 revenue [16]. At the $195 billion midpoint, $2 trillion is about ten times 2028 sales, and getting to $195 billion means tripling the July run rate [5][6].
In April Anthropic committed more than $100 billion over a decade to AWS while using more than a million Trainium2 chips [9]. It has agreed with Google and Broadcom to add multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity [10], and it is building an in-house team to design custom chips for Claude [12]. AWS and Azure alone come to more than $130 billion of disclosed commitments against a raise of up to $100 billion [10]. Spread across the decade, though, the AWS piece averages about $10 billion a year, and the July run rate is more than six times that [11].
Reuters called the listing a major test of public-market appetite for the enormous valuations and capital requirements of frontier AI companies [17]. A 5 percent float with a supplier anchoring a tenth of it is a narrow test [1][2]. The deal prices at $2 trillion on strategic and index money and says little about who funds the 2028 build. Or the book softens and the valuation trims. That is the version that carries information. Or the 2028 projection lands and ten times forward revenue looks unremarkable in hindsight [5].
In my view it prices at or near $2 trillion. Ninety-five percent of the equity stays outside the deal, so the price discovered is a price on the slice that trades [1]. What would break the funding case? If the run rate keeps compounding anywhere near the pace of the past seven months, the compute commitments get paid out of revenue and there is no second test to hold [7][11]. The listing is expected to be completed before the November midterm elections [13].
What to watch
- Whether the anchor book adds long-only institutions with no compute-supply relationship to Anthropic, and for what share of the $100 billion.
- Whether the $2 trillion valuation survives marketing, or the raise shrinks to clear.
- Whether Anthropic's prospectus breaks out compute costs and the contracted spend behind the AWS, Azure and TPU commitments.