Nvidia in talks to anchor Anthropic's $100 billion IPO

The reported talks between Nvidia and Anthropic are striking less for their size than for their shape. Nvidia supplies the compute Anthropic depends on, and it had already committed up to $10 billion alongside 1 gigawatt of capacity using Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin architectures as of November 2025. Now, as an anchor investor, it would help fund the tenant's exit to public markets — a closed loop in which capital returns to the balance sheet of the company selling the hardware.

The valuation math behind the proposed raise is unusually forward-looking even by recent standards. Bankers are applying enterprise value-to-revenue multiples to 2028 forecasts of $190 billion to $200 billion, against revenue that ran from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $47 billion by May 2026. The market is effectively pricing in a 10-fold annual growth rate, a bet that only holds if Anthropic keeps securing massive-scale compute.

Anthropic's September 10 distillation disclosure, highlighting 200 million exchanges, is offered as the main evidence that the company can convert compute into scalable intelligence. The open question is whether that conversion keeps pace with the cost of maintaining it — the outcome hinges on whether the 2028 forecast proves durable, and on whether these preliminary talks convert into an actual offering.