Key facts
- Anthropic aims to raise up to $64.4bn selling 825 million shares at up to $78 each.
- A separate $26bn private placement with cornerstone investors including Alphabet and Nvidia is planned.
- A greenshoe option could add $9.7bn, taking the total raised to about $100bn at the top of the range.
- Anthropic reported annual revenue running at $81bn as of October 31, up $10bn from the previous month.
- Anthropic listed compute purchase commitments and leases of more than $70bn over the next 12 months.
Anthropic is seeking a valuation of up to $1.4tn in its stock market flotation, short of the $2tn that had been expected before investors began to question the durability of the AI boom, according to a US regulatory filing on Tuesday. The developer of the Claude chatbot aims to raise up to $64.4bn by selling 825 million shares at up to $78 each. At the top of the $70 to $78 range, Anthropic would be worth $1.4tn on a fully diluted basis, a measure that counts all common shares including employee stock options. Trading in the shares is expected to begin next week.
Anthropic will also raise a further $26bn through a separate private placement with cornerstone investors including Alphabet, the Google parent, and chipmaker Nvidia. A greenshoe option, which applies if investor demand is high, could add $9.7bn and take the total raised to about $100bn at the top of the range. That would exceed the $75bn raised by SpaceX, the largest stock market listing to date, which was valued at $1.78tn and is now worth just under $2tn.
Dario Amodei, Anthropic's chief executive, is selling about $260m of shares in the float, as are his six fellow co-founders. At the top of the price range the co-founders' stakes would be worth more than $18bn each.
The updated filing said Anthropic's annual revenue was running at $81bn as of October 31, up $10bn from the previous month. Its main expenditure is computing power from datacentres. The prospectus lists compute purchase commitments and lease agreements of more than $70bn over the next 12 months, more than $450bn by 2030 and a further $450bn due by 2045.
Brian Hopkins, a principal analyst at Forrester Research, said the US midterm elections, which produced victories for datacentre opponents, gave investors a chance to correct valuations they had already begun to question over the financial sustainability of the AI build-out. "The market needed an excuse to correct itself a little bit in terms of valuations," he said. "The US election spook is what has caused it." Hopkins said Anthropic's valuation had as a result been lowered from an anticipated $2tn.
In a podcast appearance earlier this year, Amodei said compute commitments had to be matched by revenue growth. "I could buy $1tn of compute that starts at the end of 2027. If my revenue is not $1tn, if it's even $800bn, there's no force on Earth, there's no hedge on Earth, that could stop me from going bankrupt," he told podcaster Dwarkesh Patel. The Financial Times reported on Tuesday that Goldman Sachs, which is leading the float with Morgan Stanley, is forecasting Anthropic's annual revenues.