Anthropic (ANTH.PVT) is seeking a valuation of roughly $1.4 trillion in its highly anticipated IPO, setting the stage for one of the largest public-market debuts during the AI boom. The stock is expected to begin trading on Thursday, Nov. 19, or Friday, Nov. 20, of next week, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The AI developer said in an updated filing Tuesday that it plans to sell 825 million shares at between $70 and $78 each. At the top of that range, the IPO would generate up to $64.35 billion in proceeds. On a fully diluted basis, which includes employee stock options and other securities, the frontier AI lab could be valued between roughly $1.3 trillion and $1.45 trillion.
That would mark a substantial increase over the $965 billion valuation that Anthropic announced in a May funding round, but would be far below recent Wall Street estimates, which reached as high as $2 trillion in early October.
Read more: Everything you need to know ahead of Anthropic’s IPO
On top of the public offering, Anthropic is locking down an extra $26 billion on the side from tech’s biggest heavyweights, including Nvidia (NVDA), Microsoft (MSFT), Google (GOOGL), TSMC (TSM), Broadcom (AVGO), AMD (AMD), and Micron (MU). Those companies are buying nonvoting Class N shares at the same price public investors will pay. Because this is a private deal, those tech giants won’t face the standard six-month lockup window that typically prevents insiders from selling right after the debut.
Anthropic plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT.
The IPO comes as investors have grown more cautious about the enormous valuations attached to AI companies. Anthropic will also debut against a backdrop of growing political resistance to the build-out of data centers and other infrastructure needed to support AI.
The company’s public debut would follow SpaceX’s (SPCX) record-setting IPO earlier this year. SpaceX raised $85.7 billion in its offering, and the company now has a market capitalization of $1.9 trillion.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei started the company in 2021 alongside a group of former OpenAI researchers. The startup has since emerged as a frontier AI lab and competitor to OpenAI.
Anthropic recently revealed revenue grew $1,206% to $33.2 billion through the first nine months of the year. The company also noted a staggering aggregate committed spend of $895.4 billion, which it said is primarily related to compute and infrastructure.
But the AI growth story was put to the test last week as investors weighed a Democratic congressional win against the impact of the AI data center build-out. The market turmoil prompted prospective buyers to discuss lowering Anthropic’s valuation to a range of $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion, with some considering as low as $1.1 trillion, according to Bloomberg.
Source: finance.yahoo.com
