Analysis
Nvidia is in talks to invest as much as $10 billion in Anthropic's initial public offering, Bloomberg reported September 11, citing Reuters' sourcing, with The Information separately confirming the talks -- a deal that would make Nvidia an anchor investor in what bankers are telling prospective buyers could be the largest IPO in history. Anthropic is reportedly seeking to raise up to $100 billion in the offering at a valuation approaching $2 trillion, with the listing expected to price before the November US midterm elections. The talks remain preliminary and the terms could still change.
The relationship isn't new:
- November 2025 -- Nvidia committed to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as part of a broader partnership, alongside Anthropic's pledge to purchase $30 billion of Microsoft Azure computing capacity built on Nvidia chips
- June 1, 2026 -- Anthropic confidentially filed its S-1
- May 2026 -- Anthropic closed a $65 billion Series H round at a $965 billion post-money valuation, co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks and Sequoia Capital, with Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, Baillie Gifford, Blackstone, Brookfield, DST Global and Fidelity Management & Research also participating
That earlier Nvidia commitment already tied Nvidia's hardware revenue to Anthropic's growth; an IPO anchor check would extend the same relationship onto Anthropic's public-market cap table.
What's changed since May is the revenue line bankers are pointing to:
- ARR, end of 2025 -- roughly $9 billion
- ARR, May 2026 -- about $47 billion
- ARR, end of July 2026 -- topped $65 billion
- Target IPO valuation -- roughly $2 trillion, about double Anthropic's own private mark from four months earlier
That pace of growth would be extraordinary for any enterprise software company at any stage, let alone one approaching a $2 trillion valuation.
Nvidia's anchor-investor pattern
Pulse has previously flagged that Nvidia is already an investor in three companies preparing to list that will spend much of their raised IPO capital buying Nvidia systems -- a structure that makes it harder for outside investors to separate genuine end-market demand from vendor-financed demand baked into the revenue figures themselves. Anthropic would be the fourth and largest example of the pattern: Nvidia's chips are the compute Anthropic burns to generate the revenue now justifying its valuation, and Nvidia would simultaneously be an equity holder benefiting if that valuation holds.
The scale here dwarfs Nvidia's other AI-IPO bets:
- SpaceX -- $1.77 trillion valuation and an $85.7 billion raise at its June 2026 debut (Pulse coverage)
- OpenAI -- $852 billion valuation in its most recent private round
- Anthropic (targeted) -- roughly $2 trillion valuation on a ~$100 billion raise
If Anthropic's listing prices anywhere near the numbers bankers are floating, it would immediately become the largest IPO in history on both metrics at once -- and value Anthropic at more than double its closest frontier-lab rival's most recent private mark.
What the headline misses is that these are still preliminary talks, not a signed commitment, and megadeal IPOs have a well-documented history of pricing below the valuation chatter that preceded them once institutional investors actually run their own models on the S-1's disclosed numbers. Anthropic's S-1, once public, will need to disclose exactly how much of its revenue and forward guidance depends on compute purchased from Nvidia-linked infrastructure providers like Azure -- a disclosure that could either validate the growth story or complicate it, depending on how cleanly Anthropic can separate independent enterprise demand from its own vendor-financed capacity build.
For founders and GPs, the practical signal is less about the specific $10 billion figure and more about what it says regarding compute access going into 2027: if Nvidia is comfortable anchoring a $2 trillion bet on Anthropic's ability to keep converting compute into revenue, that's a vote of confidence in enterprise AI demand holding up through at least the next several quarters, even as Microsoft, OpenAI and others all warn of the same underlying compute scarcity elsewhere in this issue.
What to watch next: whether Anthropic's actual S-1 discloses Nvidia's stake and its size explicitly, whether Microsoft -- Anthropic's other major strategic backer -- matches Nvidia's anchor check, and whether the final IPO price lands anywhere near the $2 trillion figure bankers are currently pitching.
