Anthropic seeks up to $1.4tn in record flotation as Nvidia falls again
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, set a price range of $70 to $78 for 825 million shares, raising up to $64.4bn and valuing the company at up to $1.4tn fully diluted — about $1.1tn to $1.3tn on the basic share count — in what would be the largest listing in history, trading on Nasdaq as ANT from 19 November. Nvidia fell a further 6% as its board hired Wachtell Lipton and a former Manhattan prosecutor to run the Huang investigation.
The valuation is up from $965bn in May. Alongside the public offer, AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC will buy $26bn of stock at the IPO price, and with a $9.7bn over-allotment the total approaches $100bn; roughly a fifth is reserved for retail investors. Revenue in the first nine months was $33.24bn, up about 1,200%, with an annualised run-rate of $81bn at the end of October, against a $104bn net loss driven mostly by fair-value accounting; the company has committed more than $70bn to computing over the next year and more than $450bn by 2030. The prospectus repeats last month’s warning that AI “could, if not developed, deployed, and operated with appropriate safeguards, oversight, and security measures, pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity”. Dario Amodei is selling about $260m of shares. At Nvidia, the board said it had “retained former acting U.S. Attorney of the Southern District of New York Joon H. Kim and his firm Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to conduct a thorough and independent investigation”; Wedbush’s Dan Ives puts the chance of Jensen Huang being removed at about 15%. Watch pricing on 18 November.