Abstract:
Artificial intelligence company Anthropic is preparing for what could become the largest initial public offering (IPO) in global history, and Nvidia is considering participating as a cornerstone investor. According to people familiar with the matter, Anthropic plans to raise up to US$100 billion through the IPO, and the company's valuation after listing may reach approximately US$2 trillion; Nvidia is considering investing up to US$10 billion to subscribe for its shares.
If ultimately completed on this scale, Anthropic's listing will set a new record for the world's largest IPO, and will also be a major test of the capital market's huge valuations and huge computing power needs for cutting-edge artificial intelligence companies. Relevant negotiations are still ongoing, and the specific investment amount and transaction conditions may change. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions are private.
The news that Nvidia may participate in the Anthropic IPO has not been made public before. If the deal is finally concluded, Nvidia will become an important strategic supporter of Anthropic when it goes public, while further deepening the already very close business relationship between the two parties. As one of the world's largest AI accelerator suppliers, Nvidia itself is also one of Anthropic's most important customers.
The so-called cornerstone investors usually refer to large institutional investors who have committed to subscribe for a certain size of shares before the IPO is officially launched to the wider market. For a particularly large-scale IPO, obtaining the support of strong cornerstone investors in advance can send a strong signal of confidence to other potential investors. Such arrangements have become increasingly common in recent years as major tech companies have scaled their IPOs.
For example, Nvidia and Amazon both became cornerstone investors when chip design company Arm went public; the Saudi Public Investment Fund participated in SpaceX's IPO and became its cornerstone investor. If Anthropic can introduce Nvidia as a cornerstone investor this time, it will further increase the market attention of this super IPO.
What is even more noteworthy is that the relationship between Nvidia and Anthropic itself reflects a very typical feature of the current AI industry chain: companies that develop large-scale AI models need to purchase huge amounts of computing resources, and chip manufacturers that provide these computing resources may in turn become investors in AI companies. As the computing power required for AI model training and inference continues to increase, the boundaries between chip suppliers, cloud computing companies and model developers are becoming increasingly blurred.
Anthropic currently relies heavily on NVIDIA GPUs, but the company is also actively promoting the diversification of chip suppliers. Due to the rapid growth in demand for the Claude series of AI models, Anthropic's demand for computing resources has reached a very large scale, and it is obviously difficult to meet its long-term development needs by relying solely on a single chip supplier.
As early as November 2025, Nvidia announced plans to invest up to US$10 billion in Anthropic and reach a broader cooperation agreement with Anthropic. At that time, Anthropic committed to purchasing US$30 billion worth of computing power in Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service, and these computing resources would be provided by Nvidia chips.
Anthropic’s current lineup of investors and computing resource providers is also very luxurious. Amazon and Google are both important investors in Anthropic and are its main computing power suppliers. Anthropic announced in April this year that it plans to invest more than $100 billion in Amazon AWS over the next 10 years and use more than 1 million Amazon Trainium2 chips.
At the same time, Anthropic is also working with Google and Broadcom to add multiple gigawatts of TPU computing power. With the rapid expansion of Claude's business, the company is constantly looking for new sources of computing power to alleviate the problem of insufficient supply of computing resources.
Anthropic has even begun to try to better understand the underlying hardware costs. The company is forming an internal team to research and design customized AI chips optimized for the Claude model. If this plan ultimately succeeds, Anthropic may not only be an AI model developer in the future, but also gradually participate in the design of AI computing hardware.
The valuation growth behind this IPO is also amazing. In May this year, Anthropic completed a US$65 billion round of financing, with its post-money valuation reaching US$965 billion. By the end of July, the company's annualized revenue run rate had exceeded $65 billion, while the figure at the end of 2025 would only be about $9 billion.
In other words, Anthropic increased its annual revenue run rate several times in just over half a year. The company also currently projects that revenue could reach around $190 billion to $200 billion by 2028. Such huge revenue expectations are one of the important bases to support its future valuation of US$2 trillion.
If Anthropic does go public with a valuation of about US$2 trillion, it will join the ranks of the world's most valuable technology companies. For an AI company that has not been established for a long time, this kind of valuation means that the capital market is betting on the business potential of generative artificial intelligence and cutting-edge AI models in the next few years on an unprecedented scale.
Anthropic plans to complete its listing before the U.S. midterm elections in November this year. If this timetable can be realized, it will become one of the most watched transactions in the U.S. IPO market this year and may further continue the hot market in the U.S. IPO market in 2026.
The U.S. IPO market has picked up significantly this year. As of the end of August, the cumulative financing scale of U.S. IPOs, excluding special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs), had reached a record $137 billion. The listing of SpaceX in June this year has further increased the market's attention to the IPOs of very large technology companies.
If Anthropic ultimately raises US$100 billion as currently envisioned, the IPO itself will become a super deal in the history of the capital market. If NVIDIA invests US$10 billion to become its cornerstone investor, it means that the global AI chip giant not only hopes to gain income from Anthropic's continued growth in computing power needs, but also hopes to directly share the long-term capital value of this AI model company.
However, all figures are still in the negotiation stage, and Anthropic’s final fundraising size, listing valuation, and Nvidia’s actual investment amount may change. Before the prospectus documents are formally submitted and the issuance plan is determined, neither the US$2 trillion valuation nor the US$100 billion financing scale can be regarded as the final result.
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