Nvidia’s Impact on Anthropic’s IPO and Private Markets

A volatile earnings week. The week started out with a powerful rebound in stocks on Monday after last week’s tech-driven rout. But markets ran out of steam on Tuesday as CPI data showed the inflation running hotter than expected and Fed Governor Christopher Waller said he would back a half point rate increase if inflation continues to accelerate. Interestingly, Brent crude fell below $90/bbl for the first time since August on trader expectations that there could be a resolution to the Iran war. The latter part of the week was dominated by Jensen Huang’s resignation at Nvidia. The S&P and Nasdaq each ended up about 1% for the week as of Thursday’s close. Nvidia’s shares were down about 4%, though competitors AMD, Broadcom and others were up as they are seen as beneficiaries of potential challenges at Nvidia, and other names recovered from last week as well. Our NPM Private Market Tracker*, which shows the average price performance of the 50 largest names in our internal NPM Price data, is up ~109% YTD versus the S&P 500/Nasdaq up 11%/9% YTD.

With all of the headlines surrounding Nvidia and Jensen Huang’s resignation this week, one could be forgiven for forgetting for a moment that Anthropic is set to price the largest equity offering on record on Wednesday of next week, with trading on the Nasdaq beginning on Thursday November 19th.

Much has been written about Anthropic’s IPO, with probably more opinions voiced on the possible impacts of the leadership shakeup at Nvidia. This week we look at the confluence of these two huge news items and evaluate what impact the Nvidia news could have on Anthropic’s IPO.

Will it affect valuation?

The impact of Jensen Huang’s resignation broader industry is still being debated with the news very fresh. Concerns have been voiced that the AI industry could lose its de facto “private lender” if Nvidia pulls back from some of the significant backstop/circular financing arrangements it has entered into over the past couple of years. The Wall Street Journal and The Information reported on 11/12/26 that Colette Kress, who has been Nvidia’s CFO and is now its interim CEO, raised questions internally around how to decide which backstop/financing deals to pursue, how to value the guarantees, and how to calculate the return on investment.^*1 The Wall Street Journal article noted that she reworked Nvidia’s August deal with OpenAI to reduce its commitment.^*1 It’s also important to note that many of the deals had been led internally by Huang’s son-in-law, Nico Caprez. On one hand, if Kress blessed the deals as CFO she might not change much as interim CEO, but it remains to be seen whether Huang’s son-in-law retains his latitude to bring in such deals and whether Nvidia under new leadership might make changes to how it backstops the industry.

There is also the impact of Huang individually and the sway he had in lobbying for the industry – in addition to pushing to preserve the ability to sell chips to China, he opposed broad AI safety regulation and urged the Trump administration not to impose broad federal AI safety regulation. If his departure has an impact on regulation, for example, it could affect broader TAM expectations for the industry which would impact Anthropic’s IPO valuation.

It’s important to note, however, that Anthropic’s IPO valuation has already come down from initial expectations, and while Nvidia’s shares performed poorly this week, other tech names performed well and the markets were overall up this week.

To recap on Anthropic’s valuation:

1. 01
   Initial estimates were for the company to IPO at a valuation around $2 trillion.
2. 02
   Anthropic filed an amended S-1 this past Tuesday November 10 that included a valuation estimate – selling 825 million shares at a range of $70-78/share giving it a valuation of $1.26-1.40 trillion^*2. The amended S-1 was filed after last week’s volatility in tech stocks (the Nasdaq was down 2.3%), and this might have been a driver for the lower valuation range. With this range of shares plus an expected concurrent private placement of $26 billion Class N shares to be bought by Google (~$10 billion), Nvidia (~$10 billion), AMD, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and TSMC, Anthropic could raise ~$100 billion if the greenshoe is fully exercised^*3,
3. 03
   Soon after the amended S-1 was filed, however, the Financial Times reported that Anthropic’s bankers are considering increasing the valuation to $1.5 trillion based on strong reception from investors, and Bloomberg reported on 11/12 that the IPO is six times oversubscribed^*3.

All this is to say that the tumult regarding Nvidia may not have an impact on a valuation that has already tempered, but we’ll see how the IPO prices next week.

What’s the impact on Anthropic as a business?

Anthropic counts Nvidia as a strategic partner and Nvidia has agreed to buy about $10 billion worth of the $26 billion of Class N shares. We have not seen clues that this investment could be put at risk and it may be unlikely given the close timing of the investment announcement this week and the IPO next week, though investors will be watching this^*3.

Nvidia is also involved in a couple of compute agreements that Anthropic has signed, and if it walks away from these backstops Anthropic would need to find new sources of compute.

1. 01
   Nvidia is quite involved in the $35 billion compute transaction that Anthropic signed with Lambda in September. Under the arrangement, Anthropic will rent GPU compute from Lambda. Nvidia has invested in Lambda, it will supply the chips, and holds the lease on the underlying data center being developed by Hut 8^*4. As we detail below, the agreement between Anthropic and Lambda can be terminated by either party.
2. 02
   Anthropic signed a $45 billion cloud deal with Nscale in August and Nvidia is involved here as well. It is an investor in Nscale and is in talks to backstop the Nscale Monarch Compute Campus involved in the deal^*5. A potential credit support agreement would cover the power and construction for the first data center building that Anthropic has contracted which will house Nvidia Vera Rubin chips.

The chart below shows Anthropic’s compute infrastructure commitments. Lambda and Nscale are not the largest, though they are large enough that they would be hard to replace, especially with neocloud borrowing costs and business strategies under the microscope and the compute market generally tight.

Source: Anthropic amended Form S-1. Ranked by commitment size.

What’s the implication of the Anthropic IPO on private markets?

Away from Nvidia, we always like to bring our weekly topics back to the impact on the private market ecosystem. Similar to SpaceX, many private investors may realize gains on Anthropic after the IPO and when they are able to sell their shares. This could free up capital to invest in other private companies in the AI ecosystem similar to SpaceX freeing up space-focused capital to seek other companies. AI names have already been some of the best-performing names this year alongside the sector’s strong overall performance (see sections below). We think companies working on the agentic layer of AI or new chip technology could be beneficiaries.

Some notes from Anthropic’s amended S-1

(source is the S-1 unless otherwise specified)

1. 01
   Customers. Anthropic has 250 customers each representing over $10 million of revenues in the last twelve months; it had 1,900 customers with $1 million or more of revenues and 11,900 customers with $100,000 or more of revenue (this last number was up from “more than 6,000” in the initial prospectus).
2. 02

   Compute agreements. The amended S-1 highlights approximately $900.9 billion of compute commitments, with ~$71 billion due in the twelve months after 9/30/26 and about half of that to be incurred before the end of 2030. The amended S-1 also noted that the $35 billion commitment that Anthropic recently signed to lease server space from Lambda can be terminated by either party if Lambda doesn’t secure the facility by a certain date. Lambda has not done so, but neither party has terminated the agreement and Anthropic said that it does not intend to.

   Anthropic has take or pay agreements with Google (at least $121 billion), Amazon (at least $110 billion) and Microsoft (at least $47 billion).

3. 03
   Risk factors. Anthropic’s initial S-1 filing led to a lot of news stories talking about the long list of risk factors related to AI and that Anthropic’s technology could “pose catastrophic or existential risks to humanity.” A surprise, per Pitchbook, was that ~5-7% of revenues for the nine months ended September 30, 2026 came from customers who did not comply with Anthropic’s policies, and that four of its models gained unauthorized access to outside systems during testing^*6.
4. 04
   More share dilution to come. Drivers of share issuance include Anthropic has stock-based compensation, supplier financing (which includes Google’s option to buy up to $10 billion at the IPO price as well as converts issued to Broadcom), and the potential for the board to give its public benefit fund up to 2% more of the company based on certain milestones^*6.
5. 05
   Revenue. Q3 revenue was $17 billion, up over 1000% year-over-year, and nine months revenue was $33.2 billion versus $2.5 billion for the same period last year.
6. 06
   Profitability. Q2, which was reported in the initial S-1, produced $974 million of operating income, but Q3 swung to a loss which Anthropic attributed to expensive short-term compute and matching employee donations.

Based on our proprietary NPM Price data, the best performers of the large cap names in the private market thus far in 2026 have been:

Kalshi joined the top performers after a $1 billion Series G at a $40 billion valuation in late October and is already in talks to raise funds at a $65 billion valuation^*7.

Based on our proprietary NPM Price data using weighted averages for each sector, the top performing sectors YTD taking into account the top 100 largest names are Climate and Sustainability (193%), AI and Machine Learning (141%), Consumer (+117%), Healthcare/Life Sciences (+84%) and Industrials (+61%).

1. 01
   Jensen Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO after disclosing relationships with an alleged Chinese spy as well two employees^*1.
2. 02
   SpaceX and Tesla could unveil a merger as early as next month.
3. 03
   SoftBank reported its first loss in almost two years after a $3.7 billion writedown over its US data center projects.
4. 04
   Google is rolling out two new variants of its tensor processing units, or TPUs, aiming to capitalize on its ascent as a challenge to Nvidia.
5. 05
   Anthropic released new frontier models – Claude Fable 5.2 and Claude Mythos 5.2 – as it prepares for its IPO.
6. 06
   OpenAI held a call with investors this week to discuss its 3Q2026 results after raising $11 billion of the target $20 billion in its latest round.
7. 07
   Tesla announced that it will wind down production of the Cybertruck.
8. 08
   Crusoe sold an unfinished data center in Wyoming to Google^*8.

1. 01
   A Paradise III Acquisition, a leisure and entertainment SPAC, filed for a $100 million IPO.
2. 02
   Anthropic expects to price its IPO next week.