Jensen Huang is likely to pour 10 billion into Anthropic's massive IPO.
Just now, a super blockbuster news hit the AI circle ——
Reuters exclusively broke the news: Nvidia is in talks with Anthropic, planning to invest up to 10 billion US dollars to take part in the latter's upcoming largest IPO in history!
That's right, you read it correctly.
Jensen Huang, the man who sells shovels, is going to invest in the gold diggers in person, and he will do so as an "anchor investor".
2 trillion US dollars, the largest IPO in human history?
According to two people familiar with the matter who revealed to Reuters, Anthropic plans to raise as much as 100 billion US dollars in this IPO, with a target valuation approaching 2 trillion US dollars.
If this deal is completed, it will directly break the IPO record of 75 billion US dollars raised by SpaceX in June this year, becoming the largest IPO in the history of the global capital market.
What does 100 billion US dollars mean? In the first 8 months of this year, the total US IPO market (excluding SPACs) only raised 137 billion US dollars in total.
That is to say, Anthropic alone accounts for 73% of the total market size in the first 8 months.
According to the scoop, Nvidia is considering investing up to 100 billion US dollars in it.
However, the negotiations between the two sides are still ongoing, and the plan may be adjusted at any time. Anthropic refused to comment, and Nvidia has not responded yet.
The IPO is expected to be completed before the US midterm elections in November this year.
Jensen Huang's calculation: More than just an investment
The so-called "anchor investor" refers to a large institutional buyer who promises to subscribe before the public roadshow of the IPO, giving the market a reassurance.
When Arm went public earlier, Nvidia and Amazon were the anchor investors; in SpaceX's IPO, Saudi PIF played the same role.
If Anthropic can get a "top buyer" of Nvidia's level to endorse, the signal sent to the entire capital market is self-evident —— Even the king of GPU is willing to bet real money, what are you hesitating about?
But the story is far from that simple.
There is a very delicate relationship here: Nvidia is not only Anthropic's "supplier", but also its "investor".
Anthropic cannot train and run the Claude model without Nvidia's GPUs.
Back in November 2025, Nvidia had already invested 10 billion US dollars in Anthropic — in exchange, Anthropic promised to purchase 30 billion US dollars of computing power on Microsoft Azure, and all that computing power runs on Nvidia's chips.
Think about it carefully: Nvidia invests 10 billion, and Anthropic immediately spends 30 billion on cloud services powered by Nvidia chips. The money goes around and flows back into Jensen Huang's pocket.
Now with an additional 100 billion US dollars in the IPO stage, this cycle extends from the private market to the public market.
And it's not just Nvidia.
In Anthropic's list of major backers, Amazon and Google also play the dual roles of "investor + computing power supplier".
In April this year, Anthropic announced that it will invest more than 1000 billion US dollars on Amazon AWS in the next ten years and use more than 1 million Amazon Trainium2 chips; it also signed a "gigawatt-level" TPU expansion agreement with Google and Broadcom.
The capital logic of the AI industry is clearer than ever: All the money raised by model companies will eventually be turned into computing power purchase orders and flow back to the chip giants and cloud vendors.
Investing in AI companies is essentially pre-booking customers for your own chips and cloud services.
What supports this sky-high valuation is Anthropic's explosive growth curve.
At the end of 2025, Anthropic's annualized revenue was about 90 billion US dollars. By the end of July 2026, that figure had soared to over 650 billion US dollars, more than 7 times in 7 months.
Reuters previously reported that Anthropic expects its revenue to reach 1900 to 2000 billion US dollars in 2028.
In May this year, Anthropic just completed a financing of 650 billion US dollars, with a valuation of 965 billion US dollars. Now the IPO is aiming directly at 2 trillion, which means the valuation will double again within a few months.
At the same time, the user demand for Claude is growing so fast that Anthropic's existing computing power is already "stretched thin".
In order to reduce its dependence on external chips, Anthropic has even set up an internal team to develop custom chips on its own.
It's just the beginning
From a broader perspective, Nvidia's 100 billion US dollar investment in Anthropic's IPO is a microcosm of the AI industry entering the "decisive moment" in 2026.
As of the end of August, the US IPO market has raised a record 1370 billion US dollars, and the year is far from over.
This means that from the end of 2026 to 2027, human beings will for the first time price the "ticket to AGI" in the public capital market.
Anthropic and OpenAI, the two companies considered most likely to be the first to achieve Artificial General Intelligence, will successively land on Nasdaq to accept the public judgment of global investors.
Behind this IPO boom is an unprecedented infrastructure arms race in human history. The total global AI-related expenditure has reached 2.6 trillion US dollars.
The most crucial point is: Everyone is betting on the same thing — ASI is approaching.
The real product progress is also constantly verifying this prediction.
When AI begins to improve itself, when models begin to iterate models, once this flywheel starts to rotate, everything will accelerate.
This is the real reason why Nvidia is desperate to pour money into Anthropic: They are not investing in an IPO of a company, but buying a ticket to the era of ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence).
References:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/nvidia-talks-invest-anthropics-mega-ipo-sources-say-2026-09-11/
Editor: Solomon
This article is from WeChat official account "AI Era", author: AI Era, published with authorization from 36Kr.