Nvidia is in talks to become an anchor investor in Anthropic’s planned initial public offering, potentially committing as much as $10 billion to what could become the largest IPO on record, Reuters reported on Friday. Anthropic is seeking to raise up to $100 billion at a valuation of around $2 trillion, according to people familiar with the discussions, which remain under negotiation and could change. The listing would top SpaceX’s June IPO, itself a record-setter, and would be the defining event of the fall IPO calendar. It would also put the first of the two leading AI model makers on public markets, months before its closest rival, a sequencing that matters if investor appetite for the sector cools before OpenAI gets its turn.
What an Anchor Investor Does
Anchor investors are institutions that commit to buy a set portion of an IPO before the offering is marketed more broadly, giving the deal an early vote of confidence. The practice has become standard for mega listings: chip designer Arm’s anchor roster included Nvidia and Amazon, and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund anchored SpaceX’s offering. For Anthropic, landing Nvidia would tie the largest AI chip supplier to one of its largest chip customers at the moment both face questions about circular financing arrangements across the AI buildout.
The two companies already have overlapping ties. In November 2025, Nvidia said it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as part of a partnership under which Anthropic committed to buy $30 billion of Microsoft Azure computing capacity. Nvidia has since backed Lambda and other cloud providers that sell capacity to Anthropic, and Anthropic in September signed a six-year, $35 billion computing deal with Lambda on top of earlier commitments to Amazon Web Services, Google and Microsoft. The deepened relationship, as Reuters put it, highlights the complex ties between AI model developers and the companies supplying the compute they require. Nvidia has invested in both sides of those deals: it owns stakes in Anthropic, in Lambda, and in the data center operators building the facilities.
The Numbers Behind the Listing
Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at a post-money valuation of $965 billion. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed above $65 billion by the end of July, up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company. Those figures put the IPO valuation discussion at a steep multiple of current revenue, though the revenue itself is growing faster than almost any large company in history. The company employs more than 5,000 people and has made six acquisitions of its own along the way.
Market conditions look supportive. US IPOs excluding special-purpose acquisition companies raised a record $137 billion through the end of August, according to Dealogic. Anthropic confidentially filed its S-1 on June 1, arranged a reported $15 billion revolving credit facility led by Morgan Stanley with a syndicate including Barclays, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Deutsche Bank and more than a dozen other banks, and planned a public prospectus after Labor Day with an investor day in mid-September. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are leading the offering. Reuters reported the listing is expected to be completed before the US midterm elections in November, and a Wall Street Journal report on Saturday said executives are meeting investors to shore up confidence ahead of a launch in September or early October.
Tough Questions From Investors
The WSJ report said investors have pressed Anthropic on Chinese rivals, tensions with the Trump administration and the durability of AI spending. Those questions echo across the sector. Anthropic’s total computing commitments in 2026 alone amount to at least $135 billion, against revenue that is large but still smaller than the annual spend. Investors will want to see how the company plans to bridge that gap, and whether enterprise demand holds if the broader economy slows. The company’s answer so far has been growth: the run rate septupled in seven months, and enterprise contracts for Claude models and coding tools keep expanding.
Competition adds pressure. OpenAI confidentially filed for an IPO in June but has not disclosed timing, and Anthropic appears poised to reach public markets first, an advantage if AI enthusiasm cools. Meanwhile China’s DeepSeek continues to release capable open models at a fraction of the cost, is building a one-gigawatt data center in Inner Mongolia, and Malaysia is weighing Huawei chips for a $494 million sovereign AI project over American objections, signs that the market is not a simple two-company race. Anthropic itself has lobbied for tighter chip export controls, arguing democracies must stay ahead of authoritarian governments in AI, a position that puts it at odds with chipmakers eager to sell into Chinese data centers.
What It Means for Markets
A $100 billion raise would be unprecedented, and the mechanical effects would ripple across indexes and portfolios. Amazon, Anthropic’s largest strategic backer, booked $16.8 billion in pre-tax Anthropic investment gains in the first quarter alone; a public quote would force continuous revaluation of its stake. Alphabet holds a direct Anthropic stake, and Nvidia supplies the GPUs behind Claude, giving both compounding exposure if the IPO prices near current marks. Nvidia’s potential anchor commitment, if confirmed, would make it both supplier and shareholder to the Claude maker, deepening the supplier-customer loops that critics of AI financing keep flagging.
For crypto and broader risk markets, the deal is context rather than catalyst. Bitcoin held near $77,300 over the weekend ahead of the Federal Reserve’s September 16 decision, with risk appetite split between AI equities and digital assets. A successful mega IPO would support the broader risk-on case; a stumble would feed the correction narrative that has already pulled bitcoin down from its highs and driven four straight days of ETF outflows. Either way, the pricing of the deal will become the reference point for every private AI valuation that follows.