So Anthropic actually did it — the IPO roadshow kicked off yesterday, and now we have real numbers instead of months of “sources say” stuff.
$70 to $78 a share, 825 million shares, which works out to up to about $64 billion raised and a valuation just over a trillion dollars (call it $1.4T if you count everything fully diluted). Ticker’s ANT, Nasdaq, trading supposedly starts around November 19th.
What gets me is how fast the numbers moved. A few months ago people were throwing around $2 trillion. Then $1.5 trillion. Now the midpoint lands basically right where their last private round was back in May — $965 billion. That’s not a company getting marked down because it’s struggling, by the way: revenue’s running at something like $81 billion annualized as of the end of October, up $10 billion in a single month. It’s more like the market finally got to set the price, and the market said “yeah, we like you, but not THAT much.”
Oh, and the other wild bit: Google, Nvidia, Microsoft, AMD, Broadcom, Micron, and TSMC are putting in $26 billion of their own in a side deal at the same price. When your suppliers and your biggest customers are also your IPO backers, that’s… a lot of interlocking interests, is what that is.
Anyway — this is basically the first time a frontier AI lab has gone public, so whatever happens next week kind of sets the tone for the whole AI trade. Are you buying the story at $74 a share, or is this the moment everyone looks at each other and goes “wait, how much are we actually paying for this?”
