Anthropic is about to embark on one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in history. After a dramatic turn of events, it will now be doing so a week after the industry lost one of its most powerful figures and best salesmen.
Nvidia’s longtime CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang resigned from the company on Thursday following reports alleging he had engaged in two extramarital affairs: one with a customer suspected by U.S. intelligence to be a Chinese intelligence asset and another with an Nvidia executive who reports to him.
The timing has thrown new pressure on Anthropic’s listing, which was already seen as a stress test for investors’ appetite for AI. The AI lab is expected to list on Wednesday or Thursday next week, days after Nvidia reports quarterly earnings—the company’s first-ever without Huang at the helm.
Nvidia is a close partner of Anthropic and intimately involved in the lab’s upcoming IPO. According to Anthropic’s filings, the chipmaker has agreed to buy about $10 billion of shares in a $26 billion private placement alongside the IPO. The two companies are also closely tied commercially, with Anthropic committing to tens of billions of dollars to secure access to Nvidia’s most advanced chips.
Investors and analysts told Fortune that while they don’t expect the Nvidia shock to affect Anthropic’s core business, it could cause problems for the broader AI story.
Jay Goldberg, an analyst at Seaport Research Partners and one of the few on Wall Street with a sell rating on Nvidia’s stock, doesn’t expect Huang’s exit to derail the deal. “They’re going to go public right in the face of Nvidia’s earnings call, and I don’t think that derails it,” he said. “It’s such a massive IPO and there’s so many people behind it now that they don’t pull the IPO.”
The bigger risk, he said, comes once Anthropic is a public company. Speaking shortly before Huang’s departure but after reports that he was likely to be leaving the company, Goldberg warned that turmoil at Nvidia, including the loss of its CEO, would create a headwind for Anthropic when it reports its first quarterly results. “At the very least it will create this narrative of, ‘Can the AI narrative maintain? Can we keep doing this?’” he said. “They’ll get much tougher questions.”
Karl Alomar, a partner at venture firm M13, agreed that Anthropic’s fundamentals haven’t changed. “From where I stand, Anthropic is still in as good, as strong a position as it was before this news came out,” he said. “Anthropic’s numbers are fantastic, and they’ve clearly shown that they have excess capacity for what they need. They haven’t spent that much money.”
Anthropic is also less dependent on Nvidia than some of its rivals, running some models on Google’s TPUs, Amazon’s Trainium chips, and AMD’s GPUs, as well as Nvidia’s hardware. Anthropic has also reportedly been exploring building its own chips.
“Nvidia has committed to invest $10 billion in the Anthropic IPO. That will likely still happen when the IPO eventually happens,” said Francine McKenna, an accountant and investigative journalist who has taught at the Wharton School. “But anyone who was looking at Nvidia to bail out CoreWeave if needed should probably look elsewhere.”
However, the recent trouble at Nvidia and questions surrounding the CEO’s judgement could spill over into more scrutiny for its partners, according to Jason Schloetzer, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. He said he expected there to be “much closer scrutiny of [Anthropic’s] ties to Nvidia and customers associated with Nvidia.”
For Silicon Valley, Anthropic and competitor OpenAI have needed so much capital that almost every venture capital firm in town owns a piece of them—making them the private market equivalent of an index fund. That makes Anthropic’s expected IPO next week a high-stakes liquidity event—not only for the more than 400 backers of Anthropic, but for the AI boom as a whole. There’s a broad sense that if Anthropic succeeds, the AI boom has far more runway. If it flops or pushes back indefinitely, it would be an unequivocal negative signal that the AI bubble is heading towards a pop.
It may not be a bust. Indeed, at least one venture capitalist sees a clear upside for Anthropic. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has long pushed for tighter controls on chip exports to China, putting him at odds with Huang. The AI lab has similarly clashed with Huang on AI regulation, with Huang particularly keen to avoid any licensing requirements that would make it more difficult for customers to adopt open-source AI models.
“If anything, I think Anthropic is a beneficiary here,” said the investor, who asked not to be named given the situation’s sensitivity and their investments across AI. “They weren’t that close to Jensen…They’re building their own chip, and so the supply chain considerations that get freed up are good for Anthropic.”
