Nvidia Negotiates Anchor Investment for Anthropic's Record IPO, Plans Still Under Discussion, Amount and Timeline Subject to Change
Reuters, citing two informed sources, reported exclusively that Anthropic is in talks with Nvidia, inviting the chip manufacturer to serve as an anchor investor for a potential record initial public offering (IPO). The plans are still under discussion, with both the amount and timeline subject to change.
The financing scale is set at a historical high. Informed sources said Anthropic is seeking to raise up to approximately $100 billion, with a valuation of about $2 trillion, aiming to match or exceed the IPO size of SpaceX. Nvidia is considering investing up to approximately $10 billion. The IPO is expected to be completed before the U.S. midterm elections in November. Neither the company nor the chipmaker immediately commented.
This is not the first time the two parties have been linked. In November 2025, Nvidia announced it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as part of a broader collaboration, while Anthropic simultaneously committed to purchasing approximately $30 billion worth of Microsoft Azure computing power driven by Nvidia chips. Microsoft also has a commitment of up to $5 billion. In March 2026, Jensen Huang stated at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference that the private equity investments of approximately $30 billion in OpenAI and about $10 billion in Anthropic might be the last opportunity to enter these companies as they move toward the public market. This anchor investment negotiation effectively rewrites the "last private equity" into the "first public order."
The valuation anchor has shifted from private equity to public equity assumptions. After a round of financing in May, Anthropic's post-money valuation was approximately $965 billion, raising about $65 billion; the annualized revenue run rate exceeded $65 billion by the end of July, with an estimated $9 billion by the end of 2025. Another pillar supporting the $2 trillion discussion is the revenue forecast of approximately $190 billion to $200 billion for 2028. Underwriters previously reported include Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Citigroup. The IPOs in the U.S., excluding special purpose acquisition companies, had raised approximately $137 billion by August, setting a record for the same period.
The equity structure itself is a cross-holding among tech giants. The New York Times reported that at least 95 investors are betting on both Anthropic and OpenAI; Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia all hold shares on both sides and have signed large cloud or chip deals. Anthropic's cumulative financing scale has exceeded $130 billion, with about 300 investors. SpaceX's prospectus also disclosed that it provided Anthropic with approximately 325,000 Nvidia chips and a monthly fee of about $1.25 billion for computing power arrangements. The role of anchor investors is to lock in a portion of demand before the roadshow fully unfolds, allowing underwriters to narrow the pricing range rather than opening another round of private equity.
The market mechanism is order flow. The buy side needs to absorb the $100 billion public funds for new shares, as well as anchor buyers who must raise the valuation from $965 billion to $2 trillion; the sell side consists of new shares and old shares that Anthropic is about to release. Funds flow from Nvidia's balance sheet into the issuance account, then back to purchase more Nvidia chips and cloud computing time. Beneficiaries include the underwriting syndicate that needs cornerstone orders to compress discounts, and chip manufacturers that lock customers into their own accelerators; those under pressure include institutions that must take on subsequent issuances from OpenAI and others at the same window, as well as old shareholders who entered at high levels in private equity but now face public pricing games. The event-driven aspect comes from Reuters' exclusive report, rather than signed subscription agreements.
Jensen Huang stated that after the private equity window closes, the public equity window immediately opens with the same checkbook. The chipmaker is both a supplier and a pricing signal.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Nvidia's investment path in laboratories is "sell the shovel first, then take equity, and then write the equity into the next purchase order." The up to $10 billion investment in Anthropic in November 2025 was bundled with $30 billion in Azure computing time; for OpenAI, it harvested about $30 billion from the rumored $100 billion framework, after which Huang publicly stated that private equity opportunities might be ending. A few months later, the same magnitude of $10 billion reappeared, but the subject changed from the primary market to issuing anchors. This is not a new strategy, but a rewriting of the same customer relationship in different sections of securities law.
The direction of capital movement is to securitize chip demand. If the $10 billion is realized, it would account for about 10% of the rumored $100 billion issuance amount, sufficient to prove demand without starting from scratch for the roadshow. The motivation is twofold: Anthropic needs a name that is both a customer and a shareholder to compress the discount while raising its valuation from the private equity level of $965 billion to $2 trillion; Nvidia needs to lock in the training and inference loads that are still expanding around 2028 on its own architecture, preventing cloud vendors from cutting into its share with self-developed chips. Amazon and Google have already exchanged larger-scale cloud commitments for equity, while Nvidia is filling in the price discovery on the day of issuance.
The analogy is Intel's past investments in OEMs, TSMC's customer prepayments, and SoftBank acting as a cornerstone in massive issuances. SpaceX's IPO provided a recent example of a "trillion-dollar tech IPO that can be digested," and Anthropic aims to prove that laboratories can also be priced according to this standard in the same year. The industry phase is about control rather than simple expansion: private equity rounds have already placed Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Nvidia in the shareholder roster of both laboratories, and cross-holding makes "choosing sides" an accounting issue. The public market merely moves this web from the shadows to index funds.
The structural change is capital concentration. The mechanism is circular investment that writes suppliers, customers, and shareholders as the same entity: laboratories buy chips to boost revenue, chip manufacturers use profits to buy laboratory stocks, and after the stocks are listed, they provide balance sheet ammunition for the next round of chip procurement. Pricing power has shifted from independent valuation models to who can write down ten-digit orders on the issuance book first. Huang's statement that private equity has ended does not mean exiting the ecosystem, but rather changing the next ticket of the same ecosystem into a position that can be traded on the exchange.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- The shovel seller will eventually buy the mine.
- Private equity says goodbye, public equity rewrites the same check.
- Anchoring is not faith; it is about removing the discount from the issuance price.