- Anthropic has reportedly picked Nasdaq for an IPO as soon as October.
- The raise could match or beat SpaceX’s record $86.3 billion IPO in June.
- Annualised revenue has topped $65 billion as a $15 billion credit line closes.
Anthropic has selected Nasdaq for its long-awaited initial public offering, according to Bloomberg, which cited a person familiar with the preparations.
The listing could happen as soon as October, and the company is said to be targeting a raise that matches or beats SpaceX’s record $86.3 billion IPO in June, a bar that would make Anthropic’s debut one of the largest in history before it even prices.
Reuters has separately reported that marketing is likely to start in mid-October, with the offering wrapping up shortly before the November midterm elections. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Morgan Stanley are said to be leading the deal, and Nvidia is reportedly weighing an anchor investment of up to $10 billion.
From $380 billion to a trillion-dollar question
Anthropic’s run at public markets has moved fast even by AI standards. The company closed a $30 billion Series G at a $380 billion valuation on February 12, led by GIC and Coatue.
Three months later, on May 28, Anthropic raised $65 billion in a Series H at a $965 billion valuation, edging past OpenAI to become the world’s most valuable private AI company. Four days after that, on June 1, it confidentially filed a draft S-1 with the SEC. By July, Anthropic shares were trading on secondary markets at an implied $1.2 trillion, and banks are now said to be weighing a public valuation as high as $2 trillion.
Claude’s revenue curve, and the number nobody’s seen yet
The clearest case for going public now is the growth rate. Anthropic is on track for more than $65 billion in annualised revenue, Bloomberg reports, over seven times its run rate at the end of 2025.
Much of that has come from enterprise contracts and Claude Code, its coding agent, as businesses put Claude to work on software development and other complex, multi-step tasks.
When Anthropic filed its S-1, PitchBook’s Harrison Rolfes argued that the figure likely to decide how the IPO actually lands isn’t the valuation or the revenue number — it’s gross margin, which Anthropic has never disclosed. Three months on, that number still hasn’t surfaced, and it’s the one line in the prospectus every banker and analyst will read first.
The compute bill behind the raise
None of this growth comes cheap. Anthropic is finalising an expansion of its revolving credit facility to $15 billion, Bloomberg reported on September 4, up from $2.5 billion a year earlier, with Morgan Stanley leading the process alongside Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citigroup.
Much of the incoming capital has gone straight back out to hyperscalers. Amazon has now put a total of $13 billion into Anthropic, including a $5 billion tranche in April tied to a $100 billion, decade-long AWS spending commitment.
Google has committed up to $10 billion so far and given Anthropic access to as many as a million of its TPUs. Anthropic is also in talks to lease up to $10 billion in compute from Meta over two years, on top of the roughly $1.25 billion it already pays SpaceX monthly for GPU capacity at its Colossus data centre.
A Nasdaq listing would put Anthropic alongside two of the exchange’s biggest wins this year: SpaceX’s $86.3 billion debut in June and SK Hynix’s $26.5 billion listing in July. US listings have raised $160.6 billion so far in 2026, excluding blank-check vehicles, the most in a single year since 2021.
The timing is a little strange, though. Anthropic’s IPO push landed the same week its own chief executive, Dario Amodei, joined OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk in publicly calling for the AI industry to slow down. Altman told Fortune on September 12 that OpenAI, which filed its own confidential S-1 days after Anthropic did, won’t go public this year, citing safety concerns.
