Seven of the biggest names in tech hardware have already agreed to buy $26 billion of Anthropic's nonvoting Class N common stock before ordinary investors see a single share. Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC Partners, an affiliate of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, locked in the private placement, which kicks in immediately after the IPO, according to an amended SEC filing on Tuesday. Nonvoting stock. Money in, no say out.
Who Has the Power
The filing lays out the machinery plainly. Anthropic, maker of Claude, plans to offer 825 million shares at between $70 and $78 apiece. At the top of that range, the offering is worth roughly $64.35 billion. Add the $26 billion private placement and the combined total reaches as much as $90.4 billion. The proposed valuation tops out around $1.4 trillion.
Some of that haul never touches the company. The offering includes shares sold by existing shareholders, and Anthropic will receive no proceeds from those. Early holders cash out. The company's ticker, ANT, will trade on the Nasdaq. The roadshow launched Tuesday, one day ago, and pricing is expected on Nov. 18, seven days from today.
Bloomberg reports the deal is already multiple times oversubscribed, driven by what it called "anchor-size" indications of interest. MarketWatch's headline put it bluntly: the "big money is already lining up." Notice who's in that line.
Who Gets Paid
CFO Krishna Rao, who joined Anthropic in 2024, is not selling any shares in this offering. He doesn't need to. The filing shows he beneficially owned about 9.5 million Class A shares as of Sept. 30, nearly all of it in stock options. At the top of the proposed range, that stake carries a gross value of roughly $740.8 million, before the cost of exercising the options and taxes.
That's one executive's paper stake. The filing doesn't say what it means for anyone who actually builds or uses the product, and the base reporting doesn't either. What it does tell us is who the offering is designed to satisfy.
What They're Calling "Strategy"
Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives & Co., wrote Tuesday that the deal sets up a debate over "margin against growth," with the stock likely to trade on whether Anthropic's second-quarter operating profit or its third-quarter loss reflects its true run rate. He noted the $1.4 trillion figure includes stock options and other equity awards. Count only shares outstanding, and the top of the range values the company at about $1 trillion.
Ives argued for restraint, and his reasoning is pure market logic. "Given the volatility and nervousness across the tech trade over the past week, we believe pricing at roughly $1 trillion, with the option to move toward $1.2 trillion if the book allows, is the right move," he wrote. "A deal of this size gets one shot at its debut, and making it digestible for the market matters more than the last turn of valuation."
The Financial Times reported that bankers are considering pricing above the filed range, which could lift the valuation to $1.5 trillion or more. Weeks ago, reports had floated roughly $2 trillion. The number moves with the mood of the trade, not with anything a worker or user did.
The Cheerleaders
CNBC's Jim Cramer, in his Wednesday morning list of things to watch, wrote that a successful Anthropic IPO next week would be bullish for many chip names and the AI trade overall. He then suggested Nvidia pause investments in the AI ecosystem and harvest cash "now that the Anthropic IPO is imminent."
Harvest cash. That's the stated advice, delivered on a financial TV segment, about a company whose suppliers are simultaneously becoming its shareholders. The chipmakers sell the hardware, buy the stock, and cheer the listing. The circle closes, and everyone inside it gets paid.
- anthropic
- ipo
- nasdaq
- valuation
- nvidia
- microsoft
- taiwan semiconductor