Nvidia in talks to anchor what would be the largest IPO ever attempted
Anthropic is seeking as much as $100bn at a valuation near $2 trillion, Reuters reports, and Nvidia is weighing an investment of up to $10bn. The chipmaker is already a supplier, a partner and an investor.
Anthropic is in talks to bring Nvidia in as an anchor investor in what could become the largest initial public offering in history, Reuters reported, citing two people familiar with the matter.
The artificial intelligence company is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion, potentially valuing it at around $2 trillion. Nvidia is considering investing as much as $10 billion in the offering. The plans remain under discussion and could change.
What an anchor investor does
Anchor investors are typically institutions that commit to buying a set portion of an IPO before it is marketed more broadly, providing an early vote of confidence in the shares.
Mega-offerings increasingly line up such commitments early, precisely because of the sums involved. Arm's anchor investors included Nvidia and Amazon; Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund was among SpaceX's.
Nvidia's potential involvement here, which had not previously been reported, would give Anthropic an early strategic backer and deepen ties between the chipmaker and one of its largest customers.
The test the listing represents
The IPO is shaping up as a significant test of public-market appetite for the valuations and capital requirements of frontier AI companies, according to Reuters.
That is the part worth sitting with. Private markets have been willing to fund these companies at valuations that assume enormous future revenue; a public listing puts the same assumption in front of pension funds, index trackers and retail investors, who price risk differently and can sell.
An unusually entangled relationship
Nvidia's potential investment illustrates how closely model developers and their compute suppliers have become intertwined.
Anthropic relies heavily on Nvidia's graphics processing units while also working to diversify its chip supply, as demand for its Claude model strains its computing capacity.
In November 2025, Nvidia said it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as part of a broader partnership. Under that agreement, Anthropic committed to buying $30 billion of Microsoft Azure computing capacity powered by Nvidia chips.
So the same figure — up to $10 billion — appears twice, once as a partnership investment and now as a possible IPO anchor commitment.
The other suppliers who are also backers
The pattern repeats across Anthropic's relationships. Amazon and Google are both major backers and both major suppliers of computing capacity.
In April, Anthropic said it would commit more than $100 billion over a decade to Amazon's AWS while using more than a million of Amazon's Trainium2 chips. It has also agreed with Google and Broadcom to add multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity.
The arrangement means money moves in a circle: the supplier invests in the customer, and the customer commits to buying from the supplier. Each leg is a real transaction. The arrangement makes revenue and investment harder for an outside investor to disentangle, which is the kind of thing public-market disclosure is designed to force into the open.
Building its own chips
Anthropic has been seeking greater access to computing power as its revenue has grown, and is working to gain more control over hardware costs by building an in-house team to design custom chips tailored to Claude.
That effort points in the opposite direction to the Nvidia relationship, and both can be true at once: buy what you need now at scale, while reducing dependence over time.
The size, in context
A $100 billion raise at a $2 trillion valuation would be the largest IPO ever attempted. For comparison, the amount Anthropic is seeking to raise in a single offering is close to the sum it has committed to spend with Amazon over an entire decade.
Nothing here is settled. Reuters describes the talks as ongoing, sourced to two people familiar with them, and notes explicitly that the plans could change. Neither Anthropic nor Nvidia has confirmed the discussions publicly.
