Anthropic Seeks Up to $69.3 Billion in IPO, Pricing Shares at $70 to $80

The filing also describes a private placement in which Google, Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC would together buy another $26 billion of stock at the IPO price, according to Reuters. The report did not give individual commitments. Depending on where the shares price, the public offering and the placement together would raise between about $87 billion and $95 billion.

These are the first concrete numbers for a deal that investors will treat as a test of demand for AI companies after a sharp sell-off in technology stocks. When Anthropic filed its registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission on October 26, it said the number of shares and the price range "have not yet been determined." That announcement said the shares would list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the symbol ANT, and named Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the banks providing the preliminary prospectus.

The placement investors include companies that supply much of the chips, memory, manufacturing and cloud capacity behind large AI models. Buying at the IPO price means they would pay the same as public investors rather than get a discount.

The total number of shares outstanding after the offering was not reported, so the valuation implied by the price range is not yet clear. The Wall Street Journal reported that Anthropic planned to set a valuation range this week and start trading on Thursday or Friday of next week, which would be November 19 or 20. According to the Journal, some large institutional investors have been pushing for a valuation below the $1.5 trillion discussed as recently as last week, which was itself well below the $2 trillion floated a few months ago.

According to investingLive's calculations, the IPO alone would fall short of SpaceX's roughly $75 billion offering in June even at the top of the range, but including the placement the total would exceed it.

The filing comes days after OpenAI, Anthropic's main rival, raised $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, according to reports, short of the $20 billion it had first sought. Anthropic is listing anyway, after one of the Nasdaq's biggest sell-offs and while Nvidia, one of its proposed placement investors, deals with a board inquiry into its chief executive.

Investors will learn the valuation when Anthropic files its range, expected this week. Pricing would then follow ahead of the planned first day of trading next week.