Nvidia in Talks for $10B Stake in Anthropic's Record-Breaking IPO

Nvidia is reportedly in talks to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic's initial public offering, according to The Decoder, which cites Reuters as the original source. The move would make Nvidia one of the largest single anchor investors in what is shaping up to be a record-setting tech IPO.

What Happened

Reuters reported, as relayed by The Decoder on September 12, 2026, that Nvidia is in discussions to commit up to $10 billion to Anthropic's IPO as an anchor investor — meaning it would lock in shares before the stock begins trading on the open market. According to the report, Anthropic wants to raise up to $100 billion and reach a valuation of around $2 trillion, which would make it the largest IPO in history.

The two companies already have a close commercial relationship: Anthropic runs its models on Nvidia GPUs and committed in 2025 to purchasing $30 billion in Azure compute packed with Nvidia chips. Per the report, Anthropic's revenue grew from around $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $65 billion by July 2026. The IPO is expected to be completed before the US midterm elections in November.

The Decoder's report also notes that Nvidia "is still playing central bank for the AI industry, investing in customers like Anthropic and OpenAI while backing some $300 billion in guarantees that help data centers secure financing," with much of that financing flowing back to Nvidia in the form of chip orders.

Why It Matters

A $10 billion anchor commitment from the world's dominant AI chip supplier is more than a passive financial bet — it would formalize a direct equity relationship between Nvidia and one of the leading frontier AI labs it also supplies with hardware. Nvidia's core business depends on continued demand for the GPUs that train and run large language models like Anthropic's Claude. An equity stake converts that customer relationship into shareholder value, aligning Nvidia's financial interests with Anthropic's commercial success.

The scale of the reported IPO — targeting a roughly $2 trillion valuation and up to $100 billion raised — would make it the largest IPO in history, according to the cited reporting. A major commitment from Nvidia would help validate that valuation while also locking in a key supply-chain partner as a long-term shareholder.

Background

Nvidia's dominance in AI compute stems from its CUDA software platform and its H-series and Blackwell GPU lines, which have become the default infrastructure for training large language models. The company's rise from a graphics card manufacturer to the central supplier of AI infrastructure is covered in the MachineHours encyclopedia entry on The GPU Revolution - From Graphics to Artificial Intelligence. Anthropic's models, including the Claude series, run on GPU clusters at scale, making Nvidia a critical upstream dependency for the lab's operations regardless of any equity relationship.

The broader semiconductor supply chain underpinning both Nvidia's chip design and global AI compute capacity is itself highly concentrated, as detailed in the encyclopedia entry on TSMC's Monopoly - The Company the World Depends On.

What to Watch

Key details to track include whether Nvidia's reported $10 billion commitment is confirmed in formal IPO filings, the final valuation and raise size Anthropic achieves, and whether the offering is completed on the reported timeline ahead of the US midterm elections in November. The arrangement — a chipmaker taking a major equity stake in a frontier AI lab it also supplies — is also a structure that regulators in markets like the US, EU, and UK have scrutinized in adjacent technology deals.