Anthropic's IPO could top $1.5 trillion

Anthropic, the AI company behind the Claude family of models, launched the roadshow for its initial public offering on Tuesday, November 10, and the early signs point to one of the largest stock market debuts in history — with bankers now expecting the deal to price above its original range.

The company is offering 825 million Class A shares at $70 to $78 per share, and its stock will trade on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ANT. At the top of that range, the offering would value Anthropic at roughly $1.404 trillion on a fully diluted basis. On shares outstanding alone, the figure is lower, at around $1.02 trillion — a distinction that matters, because the fully diluted number counts shares that could be issued in future, while the outstanding figure counts only the shares actually in circulation today.

Even at the original range, this would be a landmark listing. But according to the Financial Times on November 11, the bankers running the deal now expect to price above the $70 to $78 range after strong demand on the first day of the roadshow, which could lift the valuation to $1.5 trillion or more. The total amount raised could pass $100 billion.

The scale of the money involved is striking. The offering itself could raise up to $64.35 billion, including a 123.75 million-share greenshoe option that lets the underwriters sell extra shares if demand is strong. Add in the concurrent private placement, and the total could reach roughly $90.4 billion.

That private placement is itself a remarkable part of the story. Seven of the biggest names in technology have agreed to buy $26 billion of Anthropic stock at the IPO price, at the same time as the public offering: Google, NVIDIA, Microsoft, AMD, Broadcom, Micron and TSMC. In effect, the companies that build the chips, the cloud infrastructure and the software platforms Anthropic depends on are also becoming its shareholders. It is a show of confidence from across the industry — and a sign of how deeply intertwined the AI supply chain has become.

Pricing is expected on November 18, with first trading expected on November 19. Those dates are the expected timetable reported by the press rather than dates stated in the filing itself, so they could still move. But the deal is reportedly already fully covered at launch, according to Bloomberg — meaning demand for the shares already matched or exceeded the number on offer before the roadshow had even gathered pace.

What is driving that demand is growth. Anthropic's run-rate revenue stood at around $81 billion as of October 31. Over the first nine months of the year, the company reported revenue of $33.2 billion — but it also reported a net loss of $104 billion over the same period. The losses are driven in large part by the enormous cost of the computing power needed to train and run frontier AI models.

That cost is visible in another eye-catching figure: Anthropic has taken on roughly $900 billion in compute commitments — long-term agreements to secure the processing capacity it needs to keep scaling. It is a bet that demand for AI will keep growing fast enough to justify spending on that scale, and it is one of the reasons investors will be watching the listing so closely.

The IPO comes at a moment when the AI industry is redrawing the map of the world's most valuable companies. If Anthropic prices above its range and reaches a valuation of $1.5 trillion or more, it would rank among the most valuable companies on the planet on day one — and it would do so as a company that is still losing money at a huge scale, banking on growth and compute capacity to carry it to profitability.

For investors, the questions are clear. Can Anthropic's revenue growth — from a run rate of around $81 billion — keep outrunning its costs? Will the $900 billion in compute commitments turn into a durable advantage, or a burden? And will the backing of seven tech giants, committing $26 billion of their own money, prove to be the foundation of a lasting partnership or a crowded bet on a single outcome?

What is not in doubt is the scale of the moment. A $1.5 trillion-plus debut, more than $100 billion potentially raised, and the backing of the biggest names in technology make this the most closely watched IPO of the year — and possibly one of the biggest in stock market history.