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The tech industry needs this to go well. So does Wall Street.
Anthropic's IPO filing on Monday puts the Claude creator in position to pursue what could be the largest initial stock offering in history. Investors are already measuring the 5-year-old company's potential market cap in the trillions, putting it in a category with the world's most valuable companies.
It's a critical moment for the whole tech sector, as the artificial intelligence boom has been largely driven by two companies: Anthropic and OpenAI. The latter has confidentially filed to go public, but has said a debut likely won't take place until 2027.
Meanwhile, the stock market is showing signs of jitters on the AI trade. Neoclouds and data center companies have been getting pummeled, prompting Australia's Firmus to withdraw its IPO plans and for SK Hynix's U.S.-based Solidigm unit to do the same.
Now, all eyes turn to Anthropic , which is betting that investors will look past over $80 billion in losses in the first half of the year, and see the 14-fold increase in revenue as a reflection of seemingly insatiable demand for the company's leading models and services.
"If it underperforms expectations, it'll be a little bit of a house of cards," said Jai Das, co-founder of Sapphire Ventures whose career in tech investing dates to the 1990s.
Anthropic's business is deeply entwined with tech megacaps. Close to half its revenue comes from Claude being sold through cloud divisions at Microsoft , Amazon and Alphabet , which all hold investments in the company. In the IPO, some $77 billion in notes can be issued to Amazon , Broadcom and Google , while Microsoft and Nvidia agreed to invest $15 billion as the company builds up its computing capacity. Chips from Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices , Amazon and Google are powering Anthropic's development.
Cloud providers are ratcheting up capital expenditures to meet demand, and memory manufacturers are fighting shortages to prioritize AI chips. And there's the debt factor. Alphabet, with its investment-grade credit rating, committed to backstopping Anthropic for a data center in Texas. Broadcom , which helps Google develop chips for AI labs, is creating financing pools to help Anthropic and OpenAI deploy high-performance models, CEO Hock Tan told analysts earlier this year.
For public market investors, more than one-third of the value of the S&P 500 comes from tech's trillion-dollar companies, which are all, to varying degrees, going deep in AI. Beyond that, there are software giants like Adobe and Salesforce that have integrated with Anthropic's Claude assistant.
And in the private markets, check sizes have ballooned but IPOs are few and far between. Bessemer Venture Partners and Menlo Ventures both told CNBC that Anthropic is their biggest investment ever.
"If they don't perform well, they will become the bellwether for AI," said Brad Bernstein, a managing partner at growth equity firm FTV Capital. "Their valuation will reflect that performance variation, and then it'll just be a trickle-down effect to all the stuff going on with the excess capital that's getting poured into the venture AI world. Everything is going t…