The year’s most closely watched share sale since SpaceX is about to get under way. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, has begun its roadshow and expects to start trading on the Nasdaq on 19 November under the ticker “ANT”. At the top of its price range, it would be worth roughly $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis. Whether that figure impresses or disappoints depends on who you ask, which is exactly what makes it so revealing.
A price designed to draw bidders
Anthropic and some existing shareholders plan to sell 825 million shares at between $70 and $78 each, raising up to $64.4 billion. A separate $26 billion private placement with cornerstone investors, including Google, Nvidia and AMD, takes the total to as much as $90.4 billion. Even so, the valuation sits slightly below what some investors had hoped for.
That may be deliberate. One analyst suggested that pricing close to 20% under market expectations lets buyers bid the shares up, rather than facing a take-it-or-leave-it offer like the one SpaceX presented. It is a sensible way to build momentum, and a reminder that even the grandest listings involve careful stage management. Earlier terms, briefly circulated to banks and then withdrawn, pointed to a larger raise. The final numbers are more modest.
Growth that is hard to ignore
The business itself is expanding at remarkable speed. Anthropic’s annualised revenue was about $81 billion at the end of October, up $10 billion in a single month. The company was last valued privately at $965 billion, and it was only founded in 2021. Few firms in any industry have scaled so quickly.
Demand for the Claude models is the engine. Businesses and individuals are clearly willing to pay for AI that helps them write, code and analyse. That is a useful corrective to the idea that artificial intelligence is all hype and no revenue.
The cost of keeping up
Growth on this scale is expensive. Anthropic has close to $900 billion in computing commitments with partners such as Amazon and Google. Some of that capacity depends on financing the company does not control. In other words, its future success rests partly on other people’s ability to keep building and paying for data centres.
This is the worry hanging over the whole sector. Investors are asking how quickly enormous spending can be turned into profit, particularly with interest rates still high and debt costs climbing. The Nasdaq fell 1.2% on the day of the roadshow launch, hit by worse-than-expected inflation figures, and tech shares have been sliding for some time.
Hope and caution in the same document
The prospectus is an unusual read. It speaks of bringing forth an “age of miracles”, yet it also warns of existential risks to humanity. It admits that rivals could pull ahead by building models faster, and that AI could advance more quickly than Anthropic’s ability to keep it safe and secure.
Both the optimism and the anxiety are genuine, and they sit side by side because they come from the same source: a technology powerful enough to change almost everything. Regulation adds another layer of uncertainty, as greater oversight could complicate the build-out of the infrastructure AI depends on.
What to watch next
This listing is a test of confidence. If buyers embrace it despite the choppy market, it will encourage others to follow. OpenAI is already seeking $30 billion in what is expected to be its last private round before a possible flotation early next year. A weak debut, on the other hand, would strengthen the case of those who believe expectations have run ahead of reality.
Written by:
*Chloe Maluleke
Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group
Russia & Middle East Specialist
**The Views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Independent Media or IOL.
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