Anthropic’s IPO Range Is Set, and Its Chip Suppliers Are Writing $26 Billion in Checks

The companies that sell Anthropic its chips and cloud capacity are about to become some of its bigger shareholders. Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC have agreed to buy a combined $26 billion of Anthropic stock at whatever price its initial public offering settles on, the company disclosed in an amended registration statement filed with the SEC.

That filing came with the numbers Wall Street had been waiting for. Anthropic launched its roadshow Tuesday and said it will offer 825 million Class A shares at $70 to $78 each, with 801,351,354 sold by the company and 23,648,646 by existing stockholders. The stock is set to list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker ANT. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley lead a syndicate of 22 banks, which also gets a 30-day option on another 123.75 million shares.

Who is putting in what

The side deal is a private placement of Class N shares, which carry no vote except where the law requires one. At the $74 midpoint, Google and Nvidia would each buy about $10 billion worth, AMD about $2.5 billion, Broadcom, Micron and Microsoft roughly $1 billion apiece, and TSMC around $500 million, the prospectus shows. Those shares won’t be registered in the offering and aren’t bound by the underwriters’ lock-up agreements. Some board members and affiliated entities have also indicated interest in buying up to $303 million of Class A stock in the IPO itself, though those indications aren’t binding.

Anthropic estimates net proceeds of about $84.6 billion from the IPO and the placement combined at the midpoint, or about $93.7 billion if the banks take their full option. The money goes to general corporate purposes, including compute, infrastructure and hiring. The company said it has no agreements for any material acquisitions.

Public buyers will get limited say over how it’s spent. A single Class F share held by an LLC of the seven co-founders will carry 50.1% of the total stockholder vote, and the Long-Term Benefit Trust elects directors who make up a majority of the board.

A lower number than investors were bracing for

At the top of the range the offering would raise up to $64.35 billion, and Anthropic could be worth as much as $1.405 trillion on a fully diluted basis, CNBC calculated. That tops the $965 billion valuation from the company’s funding round in May. It is well short of earlier talk, though: the network reported last week that Anthropic had been looking toward $2 trillion until recently, and that shareholders saw even $1.5 trillion as in doubt. Counting only the roughly 13.1 billion Class A and Class N shares the filing says will be outstanding after the deal, the $78 price works out to about $1.02 trillion.

The prospectus calls Claude’s uptake “the fastest enterprise adoption of any technology in history,” pointing to revenue that went from zero at launch in the first quarter of 2023 to $17.0 billion in the September quarter. Run-rate revenue reached about $81 billion as of Oct. 31, up $10 billion in a month. The same quarter still produced a $567 million operating loss, which the company tied mostly to $5.0 billion of compute bought under short-term commitments and $2.0 billion of non-cash charges from its donation matching program. WebProNews broke down that quarter earlier this month and walked through the original S-1 in October.

The roadshow started a day after Anthropic shipped Claude Fable 5.2 and Mythos 5.2. If the deal prices in mid-November, as CNBC expects, ANT would reach the market about five months after SpaceX’s record $85.7 billion offering.