Investors Lower Expectations for Anthropic's IPO, Now Weighing a $1.5 Trillion Valuation, Down From $2 Trillion, per Reuters
A $500 billion haircut
Investors are reportedly lowering their expectations for Anthropic's IPO, per Reuters, with some now considering a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, down from the roughly $2 trillion previously expected for the November share sale.
Four people familiar with the matter told Reuters that some current Anthropic investors and prospective IPO investors are weighing the lower valuation after the company's latest financial disclosures, amid broader concerns over the ballooning cost of financing AI. Three of the people said the $1.5 trillion figure was discussed by investors who attended Anthropic's investor day on Wednesday in San Francisco.
Huge growth, slowing down
At the meeting, Anthropic told prospective investors that third quarter revenue jumped 45 percent to $16.8 billion from the previous quarter, and that the company was profitable on an adjusted basis during the quarter.
Those numbers eased some concerns about the massive costs of developing AI systems. But some investors were disappointed by the growth rate itself: revenue had more than doubled from $4.7 billion in the first quarter to $11.6 billion in the second, so a 45 percent gain read as a deceleration.
The longer view is still extreme. Last year, Anthropic's revenue surged twelvefold to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, and it has committed to spending at least $518 billion over a decade on cloud services, computing and infrastructure. CEO Dario Amodei and finance chief Krishna Rao presented to a room made up mostly of the company's most prominent existing investors.
A bellwether at a bad moment
The timing is not helping. A tech selloff is roiling global markets and has hit AI infrastructure companies, chipmakers and the neocloud providers that rent computing power for AI, per Reuters, and shares and bonds of Nvidia-backed CoreWeave tumbled on Thursday over concern that the AI buildout is increasingly financed with borrowed money.
The IPO calendar has wobbled too: data center operator SB Energy delayed its listing last month, and Holtec Nuclear pulled its plans to go public.
That makes Anthropic the market's test case. A cooler reception for its IPO could weigh on the wider AI market, whose near-term prospects investors see as hinging largely on the sale's success, followed by OpenAI's potential listing next year. Anthropic, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives Dario and Daniela Amodei, counts Google and Amazon as investors, compute suppliers and distribution partners, all while competing with both.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to requests for comment, per Reuters.
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Options market and stocks to watch
Anthropic has no ticker yet, so the repricing trades through its backers and the AI complex. GOOGL and AMZN both hold equity stakes in Anthropic, and a valuation reset from $2 trillion toward $1.5 trillion moves the mark on those positions as well as the read on their AI spending.
The sentiment channel is wider. NVDA sits underneath the entire buildout the IPO is meant to help finance, and CRWV has become the market's pressure gauge for debt-funded AI infrastructure after its slide this week.
Watch flow across the AI complex into the November sale: if the bellwether prices soft, the multiple compression will not stop at one private company. Follow AI names on the Unusual Whales news feed.
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