A $10 Billion Anchor for a $2 Trillion Listing: Nvidia May Underwrite Anthropic's Record IPO

The number that stopped markets on Friday was not the $2 trillion valuation — it was the $10 billion check that might sit underneath it. According to an exclusive Reuters report published late Thursday, Anthropic is in talks to bring Nvidia in as an anchor investor in what could become the largest initial public offering in history, a listing seeking to raise as much as $100 billion at a valuation of roughly $2 trillion.

Nvidia is considering committing up to $10 billion into the IPO, one source familiar with the discussions told Reuters. The plans remain under discussion and could change; both companies declined to comment or did not respond. But if the deal comes together, it would weld together the two halves of the AI economy — the company that makes the compute and the company that buys it — in a single, unprecedentedly large financial instrument.

What an Anchor Investor Actually Does

Anchor investors are institutional players that commit to buy a set portion of an IPO before it is marketed to the broader public. Their role is part capital, part signal: a deep-pocketed anchor’s early commitment tells skittish institutional allocators that someone credible has already underwritten the story.

For an offering of this size, anchors are not optional. A $100 billion raise is roughly four times larger than any IPO in history, and no syndicate of banks can quietly place that much paper without pre-committed demand. Reuters notes the recent precedents: Nvidia and Amazon anchored Arm’s listing, and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund was among SpaceX’s anchor investors before its June debut. An Anthropic listing with Nvidia’s name on the cornerstone tranche would answer the single biggest question hanging over the offering — who actually buys the first $10 billion?

The Circular Economy of AI Capital

The most striking aspect of the reported deal is what it reveals about how money now flows through the AI industry. Anthropic relies heavily on Nvidia GPUs, while simultaneously seeking to diversify its chip suppliers as demand for Claude has strained its available computing capacity. Nvidia, meanwhile, funds its customers so those customers can buy more of its chips.

The November 2025 template is instructive: Nvidia agreed to 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 silicon. Invest $10 billion, book $30 billion of recurring demand. A new $10 billion anchor position in the IPO would extend the same logic into public markets — Nvidia effectively converting balance-sheet capital into guaranteed pull-through for its own product.

Anthropic’s broader compute commitments stagger the imagination. In April, the company committed more than $100 billion over a decade to Amazon’s AWS, including the use of more than 1 million Trainium2 chips. It has separately agreed with Google and Broadcom to add multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity. And it is now building an in-house team to design custom silicon tailored to Claude, an attempt to gain greater control over hardware costs as revenue surges.

The Numbers Behind the $2 Trillion

The valuation being discussed is not purely narrative. According to the company, Anthropic’s annualized revenue run rate climbed above $65 billion by the end of July — up from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025, a more-than-sevenfold expansion in seven months. The trajectory was relentless: $14 billion in February, $30 billion in April, $47 billion in the spring, and past $65 billion by midsummer.

At $2 trillion, the listing would price Anthropic at roughly 30 times its current run rate — aggressive by conventional software standards, but defensible if the company’s own projections hold. Reuters previously reported that the potential valuation hinges in part on management forecasts of $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue in 2028. Against that target, $2 trillion represents about ten times forward-forward revenue, a multiple that public-market investors have so far granted only to the most explosive software franchises in history.

The offering would also mark another vertiginous jump from Anthropic’s last private mark. The company raised $65 billion in May at a post-money valuation of $965 billion. A $2 trillion IPO would double that figure in a matter of months — and would land ahead of OpenAI’s most recent private valuation, cementing Anthropic’s position as the most valuable pure-play AI company in the world.

A Record Year Gets Its Record Listing

The Anthropic IPO would cap what is already a record year for U.S. listings. According to Dealogic, U.S. IPOs excluding special-purpose acquisition companies raised an unprecedented $137 billion through the end of August, propelled by SpaceX’s June debut and a string of blockbuster AI-adjacent offerings. Sources indicate the Anthropic listing is expected to complete before the U.S. midterm elections in November, though earlier reporting suggested the launch had shifted toward mid-October.

The stakes extend beyond one company. The listing is shaping up as the single largest test to date of public-market appetite for the enormous valuations and capital requirements of frontier AI labs. Private markets have absorbed $100 billion rounds with relative ease; public markets price risk differently, demand quarterly discipline, and punish any deceleration in a company whose growth assumptions are priced for perfection. If Anthropic prices at $2 trillion and performs, the floodgates open for every lab queuing behind it. If it stumbles, the private-to-public pipeline for frontier AI could freeze overnight.

Nvidia’s hypothetical $10 billion, in that light, is more than an investment. It is the compute supplier of the entire industry quietly voting that the AI capex supercycle — the one that fills its own order books — survives contact with public markets. That is the signal every allocator watching this offering will be reading.