Anthropic IPO Draws Orders Six Times the Shares on Offer, Bloomberg Reports
Investor orders for Anthropic's initial public offering are running at about six times the shares available, Bloomberg reported, as the AI company prepares to price 825 million shares at $70 to $78 each.
Demand for shares in Anthropic's initial public offering is running far ahead of supply, with Bloomberg reporting that orders for the deal were about six times the number of shares on offer as the artificial intelligence company heads toward a pricing expected around November 18 and a Nasdaq debut under the ticker ANT.
Bloomberg reported on November 12, citing people familiar with the matter, that the order book was roughly six times oversubscribed, and that bankers had told prospective investors that existing backers would be prioritised in allocations. Such figures can change before pricing, and the details of the offering remain subject to regulatory clearance.
The Terms of One of the Largest Offerings on Record
In an updated filing on November 10, Anthropic said it would offer 825 million Class A shares at an estimated price of $70 to $78 each, a sale expected to raise between $57.75 billion and $64.35 billion. About 801 million of the shares are new stock sold by the company, while roughly 24 million are being sold by existing stockholders. The underwriters, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, hold an option to buy up to 123.75 million additional shares at the IPO price.
At the top of the range, the company would be worth about $1.404 trillion on a fully diluted basis, according to TechCrunch's reading of the filing — a step up from the $965 billion valuation Anthropic reached in a May fundraise, though below the roughly $2 trillion it was reportedly targeting a couple of months ago. Anthropic also expects up to 20 percent of the offering to be allocated to retail investors, a larger share than is typical in big listings.
Control of the company will not be on offer. Anthropic is a public benefit corporation, and its founders hold a Class F share carrying 50.1 percent of the voting power. The founders, including chief executive Dario Amodei, are each selling nearly 3.4 million shares in the offering, worth about $250 million apiece at the $74 midpoint of the range.
The retail allocation is unusually broad for a deal of this size. CNBC reported that six brokerages — Charles Schwab, Fidelity, Robinhood, SoFi, E*Trade and TradePMR — are expected to distribute shares at the IPO price through their online platforms, although none will know its final slice until pricing. Anthropic has cautioned that the offering remains subject to its registration statement becoming effective, so no shares can be sold until regulators clear the deal.
A $26 Billion Side Deal With Its Own Suppliers
Alongside the public sale, Anthropic has agreed to sell $26 billion of non-voting Class N stock privately, at the IPO price, to seven companies: AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC. Google and Nvidia are investing $10 billion apiece, TechCrunch reported. All told, Anthropic estimates net proceeds from the offering and the placement of between $84.6 billion and $93.7 billion, the higher figure assuming the underwriters exercise their option in full.
The placement binds Anthropic's biggest technology partners directly to its share price. The buyers are the chipmakers, cloud providers and foundry on which the company's computing plans depend, and the filing puts Anthropic's compute and infrastructure commitments at $900.9 billion.
What Investors Are Paying For
The filing gives investors a business growing at unusual speed. Anthropic said its run-rate revenue reached $81 billion by the end of October, an annualised figure drawn from its recent operating performance rather than a forecast. Revenue for the third quarter was $17 billion, and nine-month revenue reached $33.2 billion. Against that growth, the company reported a nine-month net loss of $104 billion, though CNBC noted that most of the loss came from changes in the fair value of convertible notes and derivative liabilities rather than from operations. The company holds nearly $132 billion in cash and short-term investments.
Whether the reported sixfold demand translates into a higher final price will be known when the offering prices, expected on November 18, with trading expected to begin on November 19. The listing also sets up a direct comparison with Anthropic's chief rival: TechCrunch noted that OpenAI was reportedly valued at $1.25 trillion last week after raising $11 billion, nearly half the amount it had first tried to raise. For now, the numbers describe the largest test yet of investor appetite for artificial intelligence: a company five years removed from its founding, priced like one of the most valuable businesses on earth.
