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Nvidia in Talks to Anchor Anthropic's $2 Trillion IPO as Nasdaq Wins the Record Listing

Posted on 14th Sep 2026 06:04:18 in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning

Tagged as: Nvidia, Anthropic, IPO, Nasdaq, AI Investments

Anthropic is in talks to bring Nvidia in as an anchor investor in an initial public offering that could become the largest in history, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters on September 11, 2026. The Claude maker is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation of around $2 trillion, the sources said, and Nvidia is considering a commitment of up to $10 billion to take the anchor role. The plans remain under discussion and could change.

Two days later, the venue question was settled. Bloomberg and Business Insider reported on September 13 that Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq for the listing, which the company has been targeting for October and expects to complete days before the U.S. midterm elections in November. Between the anchor talks and the exchange decision, the shape of the first mega-IPO from the frontier-model generation is coming into focus - and it has become a live test of whether public markets will pay the valuations that private investors have been assigning to AI labs.

A $10 Billion Anchor - and Why It Matters

Anchor investors are institutions that commit to buy a set portion of an offering before it is marketed more broadly, providing an early vote of confidence in the shares. The practice has become standard for mega-listings: chip designer Arm's anchor investors included Nvidia and Amazon, and Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund was among SpaceX's anchors. Bringing Nvidia into the Anthropic deal would give the offering a strategic backer with both deep pockets and an intimate view of the company's cost structure, because Nvidia is one of Anthropic's largest suppliers of computing hardware.

The two companies are already entangled. In November 2025, Nvidia said it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as part of a broader partnership under which Anthropic committed to buy $30 billion of Microsoft Azure computing capacity powered by Nvidia chips. The reported anchor role would deepen that relationship further, putting Nvidia in the unusual position of financing a major customer while also selling it the hardware that customer's products run on.

Two caveats are worth keeping in view. First, the talks are preliminary and unconfirmed: Anthropic declined to comment to Reuters, and Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Second, as analysts at Insider Monkey noted, the report does not establish whether the potential IPO check is additional to the up-to-$10 billion commitment announced in November 2025, or a restatement of it.

The Numbers Behind a $2 Trillion Ask

The scale of the ask requires context. Anthropic raised $65 billion in May 2026 at a post-money valuation of $965 billion, which already placed it among the most valuable private companies in history. A $2 trillion listing would more than double that valuation in roughly three and a half months.

What supports the number, from the company's side, is revenue velocity. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate climbed above $65 billion by the end of July, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company. Reuters has previously reported that the IPO valuation hinges in part on company projections of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue in 2028 - figures that make the listing less a bet on this year's business than on whether agentic AI becomes the default way large organisations work over the next two years.

The mechanics are moving into place. Reuters reported on September 4 that Anthropic is working to finalise a $15 billion revolving credit facility, after which analysts at the banks involved in the financing are expected to meet with the company. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citi are among the banks working with Anthropic on the offering, according to people familiar with the matter.

The broader market context favours the attempt. U.S. IPOs excluding special-purpose acquisition companies raised a record $137 billion through the end of August, according to Dealogic, after SpaceX's debut in June at a record $1.77 trillion valuation re-opened the window for blockbuster technology listings.

Claude's Compute Web: Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Nvidia

Whatever Nvidia decides, Anthropic sits at the centre of an unmatched web of compute commitments. In April 2026, the company said it would commit more than $100 billion over a decade to Amazon's AWS cloud while using more than one million of Amazon's Trainium2 chips. It has also agreed with Google and Broadcom to add multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity, and it has formed an in-house team to design custom chips tailored to Claude - a push to control hardware costs as demand for the model family strains its available capacity.

Amazon's exposure dwarfs the potential Nvidia cheque. The company had already invested $8 billion in Anthropic, committed another $5 billion in April, and has indicated it could invest up to $20 billion more, with Anthropic planning to use as much as five gigawatts of AWS capacity. AWS sales rose 37% in the second quarter to a $169 billion annualized run rate - growth that gives Amazon an operating reason to keep funding its most important AI tenant, even as it plans roughly $220 billion of capital spending in 2026.

Google plays an even more tangled role: it is simultaneously an investor in Anthropic, a major supplier of its TPU infrastructure, and a competitor through its own Gemini models. The overlap of investor, supplier and rival inside a single cap table is a defining feature of the AI boom - and one that public-market investors will now have to price.

Nvidia as the 'Central Bank of AI'

Nvidia's potential $10 billion anchor cheque is best understood against a strategy that has drawn attention all year. The company has been investing in its own customers - Anthropic and OpenAI among them - while backing roughly $300 billion in guarantees that help data centres secure financing, as the-decoder.com noted in its coverage of the Reuters report. The Economist described the posture bluntly in a September briefing: Nvidia is the central bank of AI, and most of the money it deploys ultimately circles back to the company in chip orders.

For Nvidia, the arithmetic is undemanding. Its latest quarterly revenue rose 106% to $96.2 billion, with data-centre revenue up 117% to $89 billion. Against that earnings engine, a $10 billion IPO ticket is manageable - and it buys equity upside in a customer whose demand for Nvidia systems is growing as fast as any in the industry.

The critique is equally straightforward. When a supplier funds the buyers of its products, it becomes harder to distinguish organic demand from vendor-financed demand - a circularity concern that has followed Nvidia's investment programme through Anthropic, OpenAI and a string of data-centre ventures. Paying near a $2 trillion valuation for a company that was priced at $965 billion in May requires believing the revenue trajectory continues uninterrupted. Short sellers have been circling without committing in size: as of August 31, about 298 million Nvidia shares were sold short, equal to roughly 1.3% of the float.

Nasdaq Wins the Listing

Business Insider reported on September 13 that Anthropic has selected Nasdaq for the offering, delivering the exchange a second marquee AI-era win after SpaceX chose it earlier this year. Bloomberg confirmed the Nasdaq selection and reported that Anthropic seeks to raise as much as - or more than - SpaceX, whose June listing set the current record. The record-setting size of both deals, against a multi-year dearth of large technology listings, has made the venue competition unusually valuable: both exchanges want to be seen as the home for the next wave of AI IPOs.

The choice matters more to the exchanges than to the issuer. The New York Stock Exchange has historically hosted many of the largest listings, but Nasdaq has been the venue of choice for large technology companies, and a Nasdaq listing is a prerequisite for eventual inclusion in the Nasdaq 100 Index. On the day the stock trades, the difference is largely procedural: the two venues run different processes for setting the opening price, and high-volume debuts have strained both - Nasdaq's handling of Facebook's 2012 IPO remains the cautionary tale.

What to Watch Next

The immediate checklist is procedural. Anthropic had been expected to make its IPO prospectus public in early September, but Reuters reported on September 4 that the filing is now expected in late September, with investor marketing beginning in mid-October at the earliest and the listing completing days before the November midterms. The company will need to publish its financials at least 15 days before it begins its investor roadshow.

The bigger questions are strategic. Will Nvidia formalise the anchor commitment, and at what size? Will the offering price near $2 trillion, or will public investors demand a discount to private marks? And will Anthropic's listing be joined by other AI candidates, OpenAI among them, as some investors expect? For now, the company is preparing to go public into an unusually charged debate about AI's direction - moving ahead with its listing while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said his company would not go public right now amid the controversy surrounding frontier AI risks. The pricing of Anthropic's shares will be the market's first formal verdict on which side of that debate it is betting on.

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