Anthropic Eyes $100B IPO with Nvidia as Anchor Investor at $2T Valuation

Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, is in talks to recruit Nvidia as an anchor investor in a potential IPO that could raise $100 billion and value the startup at roughly $2 trillion, Reuters reported on September 12, citing two people familiar with the matter. Nvidia is weighing a commitment of up to $10 billion. If the listing proceeds at that scale, it would be the largest initial public offering in history, and a significant test of whether public markets will pay frontier AI valuations.

What happened

Data point	Detail
IPO raise target	Up to $100 billion
Implied valuation	~$2 trillion
Nvidia’s potential investment	Up to $10 billion
Last funding round	$65 billion raised in May 2026 at $965 billion post-money valuation
Annualised revenue run rate (end of July 2026)	Above $65 billion (up from ~$9 billion at end of 2025)
2028 revenue projection	$190 to $200 billion (company estimate)
Expected IPO timeline	Before US midterm elections, November 2026

Reuters broke the story citing two unnamed sources. Anthropic and Nvidia have not publicly confirmed the talks, and the plans could still change, according to the report.

An anchor investor in an IPO commits to buying a fixed portion of shares before the broader marketing process begins. The role signals confidence to other institutional buyers. Nvidia previously played the same role in Arm’s IPO, alongside Amazon. Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund served as an anchor for SpaceX’s offering.

How Anthropic and Nvidia already work together

The potential deal would deepen a relationship that is already significant. In November 2025, Nvidia announced it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as part of a broader partnership. Under that arrangement, Anthropic committed to purchasing $30 billion of Microsoft Azure computing capacity running on Nvidia chips.

Anthropic relies heavily on Nvidia GPUs (graphics processing units, the chips most commonly used to train and run large AI models) while also trying to diversify. The company has agreed to spend more than $100 billion over a decade on Amazon AWS, using over one million of Amazon’s Trainium2 chips. It has also struck a deal with Google and Broadcom to add multiple gigawatts of TPU (tensor processing unit) capacity.

At the same time, Anthropic is building an in-house team to design custom chips for Claude, aiming to reduce its dependence on outside hardware suppliers and control costs.

Why it matters

A $2 trillion valuation for a private AI company would be extraordinary. For context, Anthropic was valued at $965 billion as recently as May 2026. The jump to $2 trillion in just a few months reflects both the pace of revenue growth and the company’s own forward projections, not audited results.

The IPO is being watched as a test of whether public-market investors will accept the capital intensity and speculative valuations that have defined the frontier AI sector. Anthropic’s revenue growth is real and rapid, but the $2 trillion figure depends heavily on hitting those 2028 revenue targets of $190 to $200 billion. That is a projection, not a guarantee.

Nvidia anchoring the deal serves two purposes. It signals confidence from the company supplying most of the compute Anthropic runs on. And it tightens the commercial relationship: Anthropic spending at scale on Nvidia-powered infrastructure is good for Nvidia’s revenue, regardless of the IPO outcome. This kind of circular investment is increasingly common across the AI supply chain, as our coverage of Nvidia’s own growth projections showed earlier this year.

Our take

The numbers are striking, and the revenue growth is genuinely fast. But there are a few things worth keeping in mind before treating this as settled fact.

• The $2 trillion valuation is tied to management projections for 2028 revenue. Two years is a long time in AI, and projections at this scale have a poor track record.
• Anthropic’s major backers (Amazon, Google) are also its major infrastructure suppliers. Nvidia would add a third supplier-investor. That alignment can cut both ways: it provides stability, but it also means Anthropic’s cost structure is partly controlled by its own cap table.
• The IPO is explicitly timed to land before November midterms. That is a political and market timing call, not just a business one.
• Plans “remain under discussion and could change,” per Reuters. This is still a report based on two anonymous sources.

For businesses that use Claude through the API or Claude-powered tools, none of this changes your day-to-day access. But if Anthropic goes public at this valuation, expect pricing pressure and product decisions to increasingly reflect shareholder expectations, not just developer feedback. That is worth watching, especially for teams building AI integrations on top of Claude today.

What to do about it

1. If your stack depends on Claude, review your API contract terms now, before any public-company pricing changes land.
2. Track competing model providers (Google Gemini, OpenAI GPT-4o) as fallback options, since a public Anthropic will face pressure to monetise more aggressively.
3. Watch the IPO prospectus when it drops. It will be the first time Anthropic’s financials are disclosed publicly, and the actual revenue and cost numbers will be more useful than any pre-IPO projection.

The prospectus, when it arrives, will tell you more about Claude’s real economics than any funding announcement has so far.

Source: Bing News · Claude AI