Nvidia is in talks to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic as the AI safety company prepares for what could become a record initial public offering, according to Reuters. The investment would value Anthropic at roughly $2 trillion, making it one of the largest tech IPOs on record if the deal closes.
The talks show competition among chip makers and cloud providers to secure positions in the fastest-growing AI companies ahead of their public debuts. Nvidia, which supplies the GPUs powering Anthropic's large language models, would become both a customer and shareholder, a structure that ties the two companies' commercial interests closer together. Anthropic has raised over $10 billion to date from investors including Google, Salesforce Ventures and others since its founding in 2021.
Anthropc's potential IPO valuation would place it among the largest first-day valuations ever recorded. Saudi Arabia's Aramco went public at $1.7 trillion in 2019. The timing matters: AI companies have faced pressure to demonstrate path-to-profitability before entering capital markets, and Anthropic's Claude model has gained traction among enterprise customers and via consumer interfaces like Amazon's cloud platform.
Nvidia's potential investment puts the chip maker deeper inside the AI stack as companies move from private to public markets. The company has made similar moves with other AI firms and views minority stakes in high-growth AI businesses as complementary to its core semiconductor sales. A $10 billion check would represent roughly 0.4 percent of Nvidia's current market capitalization.
The talks are preliminary and could still fall through or change in structure and size. No timeline for an Anthropic IPO has been publicly announced. Anthropic did not respond to requests for comment.
If Nvidia completes this investment at the reported terms, it would be investing in a company that already relies heavily on Nvidia's H100 and newer Blackwell GPUs for training and inference. The arrangement would make Nvidia a stakeholder in Anthropic's success as a standalone public company, a departure from its traditional role as a supplier. The number to watch is whether Anthropic files a Form S-1 with the Securities and Exchange Commission in the next 12 months, which would indicate the company's commitment to an IPO timeline.
