Anthropic’s $2.5 Trillion IPO Dream Could Be Heading for a $1 Trillion Reality Check
Anthropic has no public shares yet, but Amazon, NVIDIA and Microsoft already feel its wobble. Big investors are pushing back on the price, and the fallout could reshape how Wall Street values every dollar of AI spending.
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A $1 Trillion Price Tag
$1 trillion. That is what one prospective investor now believes Anthropic may be worth after the latest technology selloff. In October, investors were talking about a valuation near $2 trillion. That figure later fell to about $1.5 trillion. At $1 trillion, the valuation would be down 50% from earlier expectations. This is one investor’s estimate for a private company, and it remains unconfirmed by any reported result or set IPO price.
Anthropic is private, but the companies that back it, host its models and sell it chips are public. Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN | AMZN Price Prediction), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) and Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) all have Anthropic ties that show up in their results.
What It Means
The lower valuation lands on a business that is still growing fast and spending even faster. Anthropic’s third-quarter revenue reached $16.96 billion, up 47% from the prior quarter. Growth slowed, though, from 144% in the previous quarter. The company also reported a $23.29 billion quarterly net loss, which includes nonoperating accounting effects.
Future spending is the bigger issue. Anthropic reported about $895.4 billion in future computing and infrastructure commitments. About $69.8 billion of that is due over the following 12 months. Meeting those commitments depends partly on whether its partners can finance and deliver the capacity.
NVIDIA’s CFO, Colette Kress, described this problem on the company’s August 26, 2026 earnings call: “The Frontier AI labs have extraordinary demand for training and inference compute, but they are growing faster than what their balance sheets and credit profiles can support.” NVIDIA said it has committed nearly $50 billion in frontier AI labs. It looks demand from AI labs that it supports with its own balance sheet to make up roughly a quarter of its business next year.
Big investors want a lower price. Three prospective institutional investors told the Wall Street Journal that the expected $1.5 trillion valuation probably needs to fall. Anthropic had reportedly desired to raise as much as $100 billion. Investors are now talking about a smaller offering of around $80 billion.
Market Reaction
Anthropic has no public shares, so the reaction showed up in its partners’ stocks. NASDAQ companies lost about $2.5 trillion in market value during Thursday’s selloff. NVIDIA fell 8.8% in the week ended November 6, from $204.64 to $186.64. It is down 21.4% over the past month. Amazon held up better, rising 7.88% over the same week. Microsoft gained 1.67%.
Bear Case
Changes in Anthropic’s value have already moved its partners’ reported profits. Amazon’s net income for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, included $53.4 billion in pre-tax gains, mostly from its Anthropic stake. Those gains raised GAAP EPS to $5.75, well ahead of the $1.82 consensus. In the next quarter, Amazon recorded $1.21 billion in net non-operating expense, and GAAP EPS of $1.89 missed expectations of $1.96. Microsoft’s quarter ended June 30, 2026, included a $3.2 billion gain from its Anthropic stake. A lower IPO price would give these holdings a lower public reference point.
Spending adds to the pressure. Amazon looks 2026 capital spending of about $220 billion, and CEO Andy Jassy said the company looks to “spend meaningfully more in 2027.” CFO Brian Olsavsky warned that “the outsized growth of AI puts margin pressure on the business as a whole because the margins are lower there.” NVIDIA addressed the criticism of its lab investments directly: “We know some will call this circular financing.”
The effects may reach well beyond one company. A lower Anthropic valuation could pull down expectations for other AI companies. It could also make investors more doubtful about the huge infrastructure spending that supports the industry (we examined seven of the power, cooling, and networking suppliers riding that expansion in a free report you can grab here). Anthropic is a test of whether Wall Street’s demand for AI investments is weakening, and right now buyers are asking for a lower price.
Bottom Line
The next milestone is the IPO itself, planned for before Thanksgiving. Some prospective investors are wondering whether Anthropic should go ahead on that schedule. Delaying the listing until markets improve is still possible. In August, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang said of the AI labs, “Two of the companies will likely go public soon, and others will follow.” For long-term holders of Amazon, NVIDIA and Microsoft, the price Anthropic sets will reveal what the market will pay for AI growth. If the most closely watched AI lab can command only $1 trillion, investors will look harder at every dollar being spent on AI infrastructure.
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After two decades of patrolling the dark corners of suburbia as a police officer, Rich Duprey hung up his badge and gun to begin writing full time about stocks and investing. For the past 20 years, he’s been cruising the markets looking for companies to lock up as long-term holdings in a portfolio while writing extensively on the broad sectors of consumer goods, technology, and industrials. Because his experience isn’t from the typical financial analyst track, Rich is able to break down complex topics into understandable and useful action points for the average investor. His writings have appeared on The Motley Fool, InvestorPlace, Yahoo! Finance, Money Morning, and, of course, 24/7 Wall St. He has been featured in both U.S. and international publications, including MarketWatch, Financial Times, Forbes, Fast Company, and USA Today.
