Scottish Mortgage's $45 Billion Anthropic Boost Drives a Shift from Share Buybacks to Daily Issuance

Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust issues new shares nearly daily, fueled by Anthropic's revenue surge to $45bn and soaring Arm, Nvidia holdings. Premium to NAV hits 6.5%.

Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust has executed a dramatic U-turn in capital management. Two years after ploughing roughly £3 billion into buying back its own shares, the fund is now churning out new stock almost daily — and investors can't get enough. The trigger? A string of blockbuster portfolio updates, led by artificial intelligence developer Anthropic, which has seen its annualised revenue explode to $45 billion.

That figure, reported in May, marks a fivefold increase from the $9 billion Anthropic generated a year earlier. For Scottish Mortgage, which holds the creator of the Claude language model as a major private investment, it provides a tangible revaluation anchor — regardless of when a potential initial public offering materialises. The private portfolio is unusually broad: the trust owns stakes in six of the world's eight largest unlisted companies, including SpaceX, Stripe and ByteDance. Many are operationally mature, globally scaled and profitable.

The run on shares has been relentless. In the past week alone, Scottish Mortgage issued new equity on three consecutive trading days from its treasury stock: 2.4 million shares at 1,466.46 pence on 20 May, 2.2 million at 1,476.17 pence the next day, and 2.25 million at 1,496.62 pence on 22 May. All were placed at a premium to net asset value. The total number of shares in issue now stands at roughly 1.1 billion, and the trust commands a 6.5 per cent premium to NAV. That is a far cry from the situation two years ago, when the stock traded at a discount and management spent billions mopping up excess supply.

Two major holdings have fuelled the demand. Arm Holdings, a core public position, surged 46.5 per cent in a single week to $306.51, pushing its year-to-date gain to 180 per cent. Nvidia, another cornerstone, reported quarterly revenue of $81.6 billion, comfortably above expectations, driven by a near-doubling of its data-centre business. On the private side, around 40 per cent of the portfolio is in unlisted assets, and the combination of red-hot chip stocks and high-growth private bets has kept the premium alive.

That premium has also allowed Scottish Mortgage to rotate its holdings. For the first time in more than a decade, Tesla has fallen out of the top 30 positions, sliding to rank 37 with a weighting of just 0.8 per cent. Some £700 million flowed out of the electric-vehicle maker over the past twelve months, with part of that capital redirected into neobank Revolut. On the buying side, Baillie Gifford added 2.5 million shares of Axon Enterprise in the first quarter of 2026, a 50 per cent increase. Axon, best known for its Taser devices, is repositioning itself as an AI-enabled security provider and has delivered nine consecutive quarters of revenue growth exceeding 30 per cent.

The trust's share price has responded accordingly. In London, it trades around 1,500 pence — the highest since the end of 2021 — and has gained roughly 28 per cent since the start of the year. In German listings, the stock hit a 52-week high of €18.85 before pulling back 5.6 per cent to €17.80. Over twelve months, Scottish Mortgage has returned 51.9 per cent, ranking first among nine peer funds. The rally has attracted a new generation of investors: an Invesco survey found that 55 per cent of young adults plan to invest in investment trusts, compared with 29 per cent across all age groups. Among Scottish Mortgage's own investor base, 36 per cent follow financial influencers on social media, versus just 14 per cent for other types of investors.

Shareholders recently approved an additional £250 million for private-market investments, giving the trust further firepower to back unlisted companies even as its public float expands. The next catalyst could come as early as mid-June, when SpaceX is expected to list — a move that would provide a concrete valuation marker for one of Scottish Mortgage's largest private holdings. The annual general meeting is set for 2 July in Edinburgh, where a final dividend of 2.79 pence per share (yielding 0.32 per cent) will be on the agenda. For a pure growth fund like this one, income remains a sideshow.