Anthropic Discusses NVIDIA as Anchor Investor for $2 Trillion IPO

The amount floated for NVIDIA's contribution is up to $10 billion. That figure came from just one of the two sources and could still change since talks are ongoing. Anthropic declined to comment, and NVIDIA didn't immediately respond to a request for comment. None of this is locked in, so the specific numbers shouldn't be treated as fixed — but the scale involved is clear regardless.

An anchor investor is one that commits upfront to taking a large chunk of shares before an offering opens. It's the seat that fills the middle of the room before the rest of the crowd arrives, so who takes it sends a signal to everyone else. If NVIDIA takes that seat in a $100 billion offering, the signal is straightforward: the company that makes the chips Anthropic buys is putting its own money behind Anthropic's future.

The pace at which Anthropic's valuation has climbed puts the moment in perspective. The company raised $65 billion in May 2026 at a post-money valuation of $965 billion. Now, just four months later, it's talking about $2 trillion — more than doubling that figure again. Revenue has grown just as fast: Anthropic's disclosed annualized revenue run rate went from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $65 billion by the end of July 2026, and the company projects 2028 revenue of $190 billion to $200 billion.

There's a specific reason NVIDIA taking this seat stands out: the company is already Anthropic's largest supplier. In November 2025, NVIDIA said it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and in the same partnership, Anthropic committed to purchasing $30 billion worth of Azure compute capacity running on NVIDIA chips. It's a bit like a neighborhood butcher supplying meat to a regular customer's restaurant while also taking a stake in that restaurant — the meat sales show up as the butcher's revenue, and if the restaurant does well, the stake's value rises too. And when the restaurant's money for buying meat traces back to the butcher itself, how solid that revenue really is becomes a separate question worth asking.

Anthropic's compute commitments don't stop with NVIDIA. In April 2026, the company announced it would spend more than $100 billion with AWS over 10 years and use more than 1 million Trainium2 chips. It also agreed to additional multi-gigawatt TPU capacity with Google and Broadcom. That's why it needs to raise $100 billion — the bills it has already signed are that large.

The same week, though, OpenAI told a completely different story. In a September 12 interview with Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell at OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters, Sam Altman ruled out an IPO this year. "I would say not 2026," he said, adding that there's "a lot of work to do" to meet the bar required for safety and alignment. He also said now is not the right time to go public. With an OpenAI IPO having been floated at a $1 trillion valuation, Altman effectively pushed that door shut for a year on his own.

What Altman said in that same interview sharpens the contrast even further. He referenced Dario Amodei's safety-pledge announcement, saying OpenAI is discussing pausing development briefly at each new capability milestone and might even announce a pact with other frontier labs to collectively slow down. Reports had already surfaced in June that OpenAI was considering pushing its IPO to 2027, so this statement reads less like new news and more like putting a "safety" label on a decision that was already being weighed.

That produces an odd picture. The company that has talked loudest about slowing down is preparing the largest IPO in history, while the company that says it agrees with that call has delayed its own listing. Both are using the same word, but moving in opposite directions in the capital markets — which suggests "slowing down" means something different at each company.

One thing worth flagging: NVIDIA's $10 billion shows up twice. The up-to-$10 billion investment plan announced in November 2025 and the anchor-investor participation being discussed now are separate matters. Reuters mentioned the earlier announcement only as background and didn't describe it as the same money. Conflating the two could make it look like NVIDIA has committed more to Anthropic than it actually has — or, in the other direction, make it look like there's no new money involved at all.

The timeline Reuters reports has this wrapping up before November's U.S. midterm elections. The report doesn't say why they want it done ahead of that political calendar, but it reads as a decision to use the open window before market conditions shift. The U.S. IPO market is already running hot this year — Dealogic data shows U.S. IPO proceeds through the end of August 2026, excluding SPACs, hit $137 billion, a record high. If Anthropic's offering alone pulls in $100 billion, that's large enough to redraw the market on its own.

Talking about safety and raising money are running on parallel tracks inside the same companies. Anthropic is talking about slowing down while raising the largest sum of money in history; OpenAI agrees with that message while pushing its own IPO back a year. Both cited safety, but pointed in opposite directions. What this week actually revealed is that safety talk has become a language capital markets now speak too.