Exclusive: Nvidia in talks to anchor Anthropic’s potential record IPO, sources say

Sept 11 (Reuters) - Anthropic is negotiating to add Nvidia as an anchor investor in an initial public offering that could become the biggest listing ever, according to two people with knowledge of the talks who spoke to Reuters.

The people said Anthropic aims to raise as much as $100 billion, a sum that could value the AI startup at roughly $2 trillion. One source said Nvidia is weighing an investment of as much as $10 billion in the offering. The discussions are still ongoing and terms may shift, the people cautioned, speaking on condition of anonymity because the talks are private.

Nvidia’s possible role in the IPO, which had not been reported before, would provide Anthropic with an early strategic supporter for the unusually large offering and would further strengthen links between the chipmaker and a key customer. Securing a deep-pocketed anchor investor such as Nvidia could also lift investor confidence in the listing, which is expected to serve as a critical gauge of public-market demand for the lofty valuations and heavy capital needs of frontier AI labs.

Anthropic declined to comment, while Nvidia did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

Anchor investors are usually institutions that agree to purchase a fixed slice of an IPO before the deal is marketed widely, offering an early sign of confidence in the stock. Large listings increasingly secure such commitments in advance because of the vast sums they are seeking. Arm, the chip designer, counted Nvidia and Amazon among its anchor investors, and Saudi Arabia’s PIF was one of SpaceX’s.

The closer relationship underscores the tangled connections between AI model developers and the suppliers of the huge computing power they need. Anthropic is a heavy user of Nvidia GPUs, but it is also trying to broaden its roster of chip suppliers as demand for Claude has stretched its available computing capacity.

In November 2025, Nvidia announced plans to invest as much as $10 billion in the AI startup under a wider partnership in which Anthropic agreed to purchase $30 billion of Microsoft Azure computing capacity running on Nvidia chips.

Anthropic already has some of the world’s largest technology companies among its backers, including Amazon and Google, which are also major suppliers of its computing capacity. In April, the company said it would commit more than $100 billion over a decade to Amazon’s AWS and use more than 1 million of Amazon’s Trainium2 chips. It has also agreed with Google and Broadcom to add multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity.

Anthropic has been seeking access to more compute as its revenue has surged. It is also working to gain greater control over hardware costs by forming an in-house team to design custom chips tailored for Claude.

The listing, expected to complete before the U.S. midterm elections in November, would mark another jump in Anthropic’s valuation. The Claude maker raised $65 billion in May at a post-money valuation of $965 billion. Its annualized revenue run rate had climbed above $65 billion by the end of July, from about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company. The potential valuation also hinges in part on company projections of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue in 2028, Reuters previously reported.