What Reuters reported
Nvidia is in talks to invest as much as $10bn in Anthropic’s initial public offering as an anchor investor, Reuters reported on 11 September, citing people familiar with the discussions. The same people said Anthropic is working towards raising about $100bn at a valuation of roughly $2tn, and that the listing is expected to be completed before the US midterm elections in November.
Anthropic declined to comment, and Nvidia did not immediately respond to a request for comment, according to the report. The plans are not final and the terms could change. Bloomberg carried the story on the same day.
What an anchor investor buys
An anchor investor commits to a set portion of an offering before it is marketed to the wider market. For an offering of this size the purpose is practical as much as symbolic: $100bn of stock is more than the market absorbs on sentiment alone, and a named institution taking a slice up front narrows the range of outcomes on pricing day.
The two companies are already tied together
Nvidia is not a new name on Anthropic’s cap table. In November 2025 it committed to invest up to $10bn in the company as part of a broader partnership, under which Anthropic agreed to buy $30bn of Microsoft Azure capacity running on Nvidia chips, Reuters noted. A further $10bn through the IPO would roughly double that exposure.
That closeness is also the awkward part. A chip supplier taking a large equity position in a customer whose spending flows back to it is the pattern investors have begun to scrutinise across the sector, and it is the question a prospectus will have to answer in plain terms rather than in a footnote.
The bill the raise has to cover
Anthropic’s compute commitments run well past what an ordinary listing funds. Reuters points to more than $100bn over a decade with Amazon for AWS capacity, including about one million Trainium2 chips, and multi-gigawatt TPU capacity contracted through Google and Broadcom.
The company has been assembling the financing in stages. Bloomberg reported on 3 September that it was close to finalising a $15bn pre-IPO credit facility, and reporting earlier in September put the launch of the offering itself in mid-October.
What to watch
Three things will settle how much of this survives contact with the market. Whether Nvidia’s commitment appears in the prospectus, and at what size. Whether the $2tn figure holds once the book is open, given that it is a number from people describing a negotiation rather than a filing. And whether the November timetable holds: an offering aimed at completing before the midterms has very little room to slip.
