In the same week the AI industry made a rare collective call to "slow down," a deal that could rewrite capital-markets history is quietly taking shape. According to Reuters, citing people familiar with the matter, Claude developer Anthropic has chosen Nasdaq for its listing, targeting a raise of up to $100 billion at a valuation near $2 trillion — a debut that would surpass SpaceX's roughly $1.77 trillion listing in June and become the largest initial public offering in human history.
The most closely watched detail is Nvidia's presence. Sources say the chipmaker is in talks to act as an anchor investor with a commitment of up to $10 billion — roughly 10% of the target raise. Notably, Nvidia already committed an equally large $10 billion in November 2025 through its partnership with Anthropic and Microsoft. If the anchor stake goes through, Nvidia would not only keep supplying Anthropic's compute backbone, but would also be publicly vouching for it in the equity market.
Anthropic's capital story rests on staggering revenue growth: by its own accounting, annualized revenue surged from roughly $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $65 billion by the end of July 2026, with 2028 projections reaching as high as $190 billion. Meanwhile, Bloomberg and the Financial Times report Anthropic has told some shareholders it will publish adjusted operating profit figures this quarter — a rare earnings preview widely read as a key move to steady investor expectations before the listing.
The timing is dramatic. On September 12, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay urging the industry to pace the frontier, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced OpenAI would not pursue an IPO this year. Market analysts see the divergence in listing pace between Anthropic and OpenAI as reflecting a subtle tug-of-war between AI's "safety narrative" and its "capital narrative": one emphasizes the need to brake on risk, the other needs enormous funding to sustain research and compute expansion.
Negotiations are still underway, and terms could change at any time. But in the race for the "biggest IPO ever," Nvidia's potential $10 billion check is both a vote of confidence in its largest customer and a signal that this mega-listing is bound to the most vital interests of the AI supply chain from day one.