Nvidia is in talks to become an anchor investor in Anthropic's initial public offering, committing as much as $10 billion to what could become the largest IPO in history, according to a Reuters exclusive published Friday evening and still driving the AI business news cycle through the weekend.
Two people familiar with the matter told Reuters that Anthropic is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation of roughly $2 trillion — and that the chipmaker it buys most of its compute from is weighing up to $10 billion of that total. Bloomberg quickly picked up the report, and the story continued to draw fresh coverage from outlets including Mashable and The American Bazaar on Sunday. For continuous tracking of the deal and the market reaction around it, follow our AI business news section.
The Numbers Behind the Deal
The headline figures are hard to overstate. A $100 billion raise would dwarf every previous initial public offering. Reuters, citing Dealogic data, noted that US IPOs excluding blank-check vehicles raised a record $137 billion in the first eight months of 2026 — meaning Anthropic alone would be seeking roughly 73 percent of what every other US listing combined raised during a record-setting year.
The $2 trillion valuation would place Anthropic, a private company founded in 2021, above the market capitalization of most of the S&P 100 at the moment its shares begin trading. Neither company has confirmed the terms: Anthropic declined to comment and Nvidia did not respond to Reuters' request, and both sources cautioned that the plans remain under discussion and could change.
Why an Anchor Investor Matters
An anchor investor commits to a defined slice of an offering before it is marketed widely, giving institutional buyers behind them confidence the book will fill. For an IPO of this size, that role is not a nicety — it is arguably the difference between a successful listing and a historic embarrassment.
The precedent Reuters pointed to is instructive: when Arm went public, Nvidia itself served as an anchor investor alongside Amazon. Now the same playbook may be applied at a scale roughly two orders of magnitude larger, with Nvidia once again in the anchor seat.
The Supplier-Investor Circular
The most scrutinized aspect of the arrangement is what analysts describe as the circular relationship between the two companies. Nvidia sells Anthropic the GPUs its models run on. Under this plan, Nvidia would also help set the price the market pays for Anthropic's equity.
The template was set in November 2025, when Microsoft, Nvidia and Anthropic announced a package of strategic partnerships: Nvidia committed up to $10 billion and Microsoft up to $5 billion in investments, while Anthropic committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity — running on Nvidia chips — and contract for up to an additional gigawatt of capacity. As TECHi's analysis of the Reuters report observed, up to $15 billion flowed in from the two partners while $30 billion was committed back out to one of them for hardware built by the other. A second $10 billion from Nvidia at the IPO would extend that pattern into the public market.
Nor is Nvidia unique in occupying both seats. Amazon and Google are among Anthropic's largest backers and its largest compute suppliers. In April, Anthropic said it would commit more than $100 billion over a decade to AWS while using over a million of Amazon's Trainium2 chips, and it has separately agreed with Google and Broadcom to add multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity. The register of investors funding Anthropic and the register of suppliers it pays are nearly the same list.
None of this is improper or hidden — strategic investment by suppliers is a normal feature of capital-intensive industries. But it changes what an anchor commitment signals. An anchor investor is supposed to be an independent vote of confidence in a price. A supplier's stake in a customer that is already contractually committed to buying its hardware is something more like a vendor financing its own order book, a distinction market analysts will be watching closely when the prospectus drops.
Anthropic's Growth Justifies the Ask — On Paper
What makes the number discussable at all is the growth underneath it. Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate passed $65 billion by the end of July, according to company figures cited in the Reuters coverage — up from roughly $9 billion at the close of 2025, a more than sevenfold increase in seven months. The Wall Street Journal has separately reported that Anthropic's Q3 profit is projected to top $1 billion, an unusual claim for a company at this stage of hypergrowth.
For Nvidia's shareholders, meanwhile, $10 billion is not a balance-sheet event. The company trades at a valuation measured in trillions and has taken strategic stakes before. The more consequential question, raised by analysts quoted around the Reuters report, is disclosure: when a supplier funds customers that are committed to buying its hardware, investors eventually ask how much of reported chip demand is genuine end-market appetite and how much is recycled capital. As AI infrastructure bets grow larger and more intertwined, that accounting question moves to the center of the bull case for the entire sector. Our homepage has more on how AI's funding webs are tightening.
What Comes Next
Both companies are staying quiet, and the sources who spoke to Reuters emphasized that nothing is final. Anthropic's IPO paperwork and launch window have been the subject of intense speculation for weeks, with prior reporting pointing toward a mid-October launch and a banking syndicate led by Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs. An Nvidia anchor commitment, if finalized, would be the clearest signal yet that the largest IPO ever attempted has the institutional support it needs to price — and the most visible example yet of AI's capital loops closing in on themselves.
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