Nvidia Weighs $10 Billion Anchor Stake in Anthropic's Record-Setting IPO

Nvidia is in talks to anchor Anthropic's listing, which targets up to $100 billion raised at a roughly $2 trillion valuation, per Reuters.

Nvidia is in talks to take a stake of as much as $10 billion in Anthropic's planned stock market debut, according to Reuters, which cited two people familiar with the discussions on Friday. The chatbot developer behind Claude is aiming to raise up to $100 billion at a valuation of roughly $2 trillion — a listing that would eclipse even SpaceX's offering to become the largest IPO on record.

Talks remain fluid and the terms could still shift. Should the chipmaker sign on as an anchor investor, it would extend a relationship that already runs deep: in November 2025 Nvidia committed up to $10 billion to Anthropic, while the AI company in turn ordered $30 billion in cloud capacity from Microsoft Azure. Anthropic had already pulled in $65 billion in May at a post-money valuation of $965 billion.

Revenue Curve Backs the Headline Number

The $2 trillion target looks ambitious, yet it is not plucked from thin air. Anthropic closed July with an annualized revenue run rate above $65 billion, up from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. Internal projections for 2028 point to $190 billion to $200 billion. The IPO is slated to land before the U.S. midterm elections in November, with media reports suggesting an October window.

For Nvidia, the move is more than a financial wager. The company is also the primary supplier for Anthropic's computing infrastructure, so a stake would reinforce its standing as the preferred hardware partner across the AI value chain. Just how tightly the major cloud players are already bound to Anthropic shows up in recent quarterly results from Amazon and Alphabet, both of which booked profit contributions from their holdings in the company.

Hugging Face Deal Adds a Second Front

The Anthropic talks are unfolding alongside another major expansion. In early September, Nvidia announced it would acquire AI platform Hugging Face for $12.93 billion. Reuters reported that roughly $11.9 billion of that is earmarked for Hugging Face investors, with as much as $1 billion set aside as stock-based retention awards for employees joining Nvidia. The transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to antitrust clearance. CEO Jensen Huang made clear, according to Reuters, that Hugging Face will remain an open platform and that developers there will not be required to use Nvidia compute.

Operationally, the company has been busy on several fronts at once: a partnership with Palantir for sovereign AI infrastructure in critical supply chains, an expansion of data center capacity in Australia, and new tie-ups for real-time AI in broadcasting. Lenovo and Acer are also set to bring the first Windows PCs with the RTX-Spark chip to market in October, pairing a Blackwell graphics processor with a Grace CPU.

Market Response Stays Muted

None of it has stirred much movement in the share price. Nvidia closed Friday at EUR 188.22, essentially flat on the day. Over the past week the stock shed 5.1%, leaving it about 7% below its 52-week high of EUR 202.50 set in mid-May. A relative strength index of just under 49 signals neither overbought nor oversold conditions — a sign that investors are holding back.

The Hugging Face acquisition still has to clear antitrust review, an outcome that is anything but certain and one that could push the 2027 timeline. On a 30-day view the shares are down 3.2%, with annualized volatility running at 40%. Should the integration of several large projects at once — Hugging Face, the Australia build-out, new chip generations — prove harder to digest than expected, the stock could slip below its 50-day moving average of EUR 185.04.

Sentiment has also been colored by voices from within Anthropic itself. A researcher there resigned in September, while the company's own alignment lead publicly put the probability of AI systems wiping out humanity within a decade at more than 10%.

Even so, the strategic logic of a stake is unchanged for Nvidia, which remains tethered to the growth of the leading AI labs as their key supplier. Whether the talks translate into a binding commitment is, for now, an open question.