Nvidia is reportedly in talks to pour $10 billion into Anthropic's planned initial public offering, a deal that would let the chipmaker fund the very company that buys its most expensive hardware.
Reuters reported September 11 that Nvidia is in discussions to serve as an anchor investor in what Anthropic hopes will be a $100 billion IPO, targeting a valuation near $2 trillion. If the offering reaches that size, it would dwarf the current record, Saudi Aramco's $29.4 billion IPO in 2019, by a factor of roughly 3.4.
The numbers alone are staggering. But the deeper story is the circular financial arrangement taking shape: Nvidia sells the chips Anthropic needs, then turns around and invests billions in Anthropic's stock, effectively recycling revenue from its biggest customer back into that customer's balance sheet. The capital Nvidia provides returns to its own ledger when Anthropic spends it on more Nvidia hardware. That is not a market. That is a loop.
Anthropic's trajectory reads less like a company maturing toward public markets and more like a rocket burning through altitude markers. In November 2025, the AI firm carried a valuation of roughly $350 billion. By May 2026, that figure had climbed to approximately $965 billion. Now bankers are reportedly pricing the IPO near $2 trillion, inside an eighteen-month window.
Revenue has kept pace. Anthropic posted $9 billion at the end of 2025 and hit $47 billion by May 2026, a pace the source article characterizes as a tenfold annual growth rate. Bankers are reportedly applying enterprise value-to-revenue multiples against projected 2028 revenue of $190 billion to $200 billion to justify the $2 trillion target. No specific banks involved in the valuation work have been named publicly.
On September 10, Anthropic released what was described as a "distillation disclosure" highlighting 200 million exchanges, a data point that underscores the scale of usage its Claude model has achieved, though the full contents of the disclosure have not been made public.
The proposed IPO anchor investment would not be Nvidia's first large bet on Anthropic. In November 2025, Nvidia committed up to $10 billion in direct investment along with one gigawatt of compute capacity built on its Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin chip architectures. Whether the reported IPO anchor stake is a new $10 billion commitment on top of that earlier pledge, or a restructuring of the same capital, remains unclear from available reporting.
Either way, the arrangement creates an unusually tight financial circle. Nvidia manufactures the processors Anthropic requires to train and run its AI models. Nvidia then invests in Anthropic, supplying the cash Anthropic uses to buy more Nvidia processors. The chipmaker is simultaneously supplier, investor, and beneficiary of its customer's growth.
Conservative investors and free-market advocates should pay attention. When a dominant hardware supplier bankrolls its own largest buyer's IPO, the usual market signals, independent pricing, arm's-length competition, organic demand, get muddied. The question is whether this represents genuine confidence in Anthropic's business or a strategy to lock in demand for Nvidia's chips by making sure its customer never runs short of capital to spend on them.
Anthropic, the company behind the Claude large language model, has filed its IPO paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Washington Examiner reported. The filing positions Anthropic ahead of rival OpenAI in the race to go public. Analysts have argued that being first to IPO could prove decisive, since investor appetite may not support two massive AI offerings at the same time.
That competitive dynamic adds another layer to Nvidia's reported interest. Anchoring the first mega-scale AI IPO would give Nvidia a financial stake in the winner of a two-horse race before the second horse even reaches the gate. If analysts are right that the market can absorb only one of these offerings, Nvidia's $10 billion would help ensure its preferred partner gets there first.
For all the eye-popping figures, the reporting leaves significant gaps. No one has disclosed the structure of Nvidia's proposed anchor position, the size of the equity stake, lockup terms, or whether it would carry board rights. The discussions are described as ongoing, not concluded. And the revenue figures that bankers are using to justify a $2 trillion valuation, $190 billion to $200 billion projected for 2028, have no public attribution beyond unnamed bankers' models.
Anthropic's own revenue numbers, while impressive, have not been independently audited in any document referenced in the reporting. The jump from $9 billion to $47 billion in roughly five months is extraordinary. Whether that growth is sustainable, or whether it reflects one-time enterprise contracts and cloud computing deals that may not recur at the same rate, is a question no one appears to be asking loudly enough.
And the $2 trillion valuation target itself deserves scrutiny. That figure would place Anthropic, a company that did not exist a decade ago, in the same market-cap neighborhood as the largest corporations on earth. It would be built almost entirely on forward revenue projections two years out, in an industry where the competitive landscape shifts by the quarter.
When the company selling the shovels is also financing the gold mine and buying shares in the mining operation, everyone involved has an incentive to keep the price of gold climbing. Taxpayers and retail investors who eventually buy into this IPO deserve to know exactly how much of Anthropic's growth depends on one supplier's willingness to keep writing checks, and what happens if that willingness ever stops.