Nvidia has made a follow-up investment of 66.7 billion yuan, the largest IPO in history has launched its roadshow, and the 7 founders will collectively cash out more than 10 billion yuan.
7 founders plan to cash out 12.3 billion yuan.
Nov. 11 report from Zhidx, last night, Anthropic officially kicked off its initial public offering (IPO) roadshow, announcing the offering price range at $70 to $78 per share (approximately RMB 466.9 to 520.2), and plans to issue 825 million shares.
Calculated at the upper limit of the offering price, this IPO can raise up to $643.5 billion (approximately RMB 4.2924 trillion), Anthropic's fully diluted valuation can reach up to $1.405 trillion (approximately RMB 9.3 trillion).
Citing people familiar with the matter, CNBC reported that Anthropic plans to set the final offering price on November 18 Eastern Time, and start trading on Nasdaq on November 19.
In addition to public offering of shares, Anthropic will also sell shares to seven tech companies including Google, Nvidia, AMD, Microsoft, Broadcom, Micron, TSMC through a $260 billion (approximately RMB 1.7343 trillion) private placement. The total maximum proceeds from the two transactions will be about $904 billion (approximately RMB 6.03 trillion).
Among them, Google and Nvidia each plan to invest $100 billion (approximately RMB 667 billion), accounting for about 77% of the total private placement size, becoming the two investors with the highest subscription amount.
Right as the IPO roadshow kicked off, Anthropic also disclosed its latest revenue data. As of October 31, the company's annualized revenue run rate has reached $810 billion (approximately RMB 5.403 trillion), up $10 billion from the end of September.
Meanwhile, according to the Financial Times of the UK, as the lead underwriter of this IPO, Goldman Sachs expects Anthropic's annual revenue to exceed $6 trillion by 2030 (approximately RMB 4 trillion), which is about 130 times that of 2025, and it will achieve positive full-year free cash flow in the same year.
01. Maximum valuation of $1.4 trillion, expected to be officially listed on November 19
According to the offering plan announced by Anthropic, among the 825 million Class A common shares to be issued this time, about 801 million shares will be issued by Anthropic, and the remaining about 23.65 million shares will be sold by existing shareholders.
Calculated at the offering price range of $70 to $78 per share, the total fundraising size of the IPO is expected to be between $577.5 billion and $643.5 billion.
Among them, Anthropic can raise up to about $625.1 billion (approximately RMB 4.1696 trillion) through issuing new shares, and the remaining maximum of about $1.84 billion (approximately RMB 12.27 billion) belongs to the existing shareholders who sell the shares. Anthropic will not gain any proceeds from this part of share sale. And the above amounts do not deduct issuance costs such as underwriting fees.
The existing shareholders selling shares this time are exactly the seven co-founders of Anthropic. According to TechCrunch, the seven co-founders of Anthropic plan to sell 3.3784 million shares each, totaling about 23.65 million shares. Calculated at the offering price range of $70 to $78 per share, each person is expected to get about $236 million to $264 million (approximately RMB 1.57 billion to 1.76 billion), and the seven can cash out up to about $1.845 billion (approximately RMB 12.3 billion) in total.
The seven are Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, Daniela Amodei, President and Chairman, Tom Brown, Chief Compute Officer, Jack Clark, Head of Public Interest, Jared Kaplan, Chief Science Officer, Sam McCandlish, Chief Architect, and Christopher Olah, Head of Interpretability Research.
Although the seven founders plan to sell part of their shares, they will still hold the voting rights of the company. After the IPO is completed, the seven will hold about 3.2% of Class A common shares each, totaling about 22%. In addition, Founder LLC jointly established by the founders will also hold one Class F share with special voting rights, controlling about 51.1% of Anthropic's total voting rights.
Meanwhile, Reed Hastings, member of Anthropic's board of directors and co-founder of Netflix, said he intends to subscribe for about $300 million worth of shares through his donor-advised fund, and another director Christopher Liddell also plans to subscribe for about $3 million worth of shares.
Anthropic also plans to grant a 30-day over-allotment option to underwriters, allowing them to purchase up to an additional 123.75 million shares.
In terms of valuation, calculated at the upper limit of the $78 offering price, Anthropic's fully diluted valuation can reach about $1.405 trillion. Fully diluted valuation includes potential shares such as stock options and restricted stocks; if these securities are not taken into account, Anthropic's market capitalization is about $1 trillion.
This valuation is higher than the $965 billion valuation of Anthropic's financing in May this year, but lower than the previously discussed target of about $2 trillion in the market.
Anthropic's single-round financing size and corresponding post-money valuation over time (unit: billion US dollars)
Anthropic's IPO will also become one of the largest tech company listing transactions this year. In June this year, SpaceX under Elon Musk completed its IPO. SpaceX raised about $750 billion at that time, with a listing valuation close to $1.75 trillion.
However, Anthropic's listing this time coincides with the adjustment of the US stock tech sector. Due to investors' concerns about excessive investment in AI infrastructure, rising financing costs, and whether huge investment can be converted into sufficient revenue, AI-related stocks have been under certain pressure recently.
For Anthropic, this roadshow will test how much price the public market is willing to pay for the growth expectation of AI companies.
02. Nvidia plans to invest $100 billion, seven tech companies subscribe collectively
Another highlight of this IPO is that Anthropic has introduced seven tech companies to participate in the private placement.
According to Anthropic's updated prospectus, AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC will subscribe for a total of $260 billion of Class N common shares at the same per-share price as the IPO. These shares are not registered securities for this public offering, nor are they subject to the underwriter lock-up agreement.
Among them, Google and Nvidia each plan to invest $100 billion (approximately RMB 667 billion), and the two companies will subscribe for a total of $200 billion, accounting for about 77% of the total private placement size. Calculated at the hypothetical offering price of $74 per share, which is the midpoint of the proposed offering price range of this IPO, Google and Nvidia will each subscribe for about 135 million Class N common shares.
The subscription amounts of the remaining five companies have also been clarified: AMD plans to invest $25 billion, Broadcom, Micron and Microsoft each invest $10 billion, and TSMC's subsidiary TSMC Partners plans to invest $5 billion. The corresponding number of subscribed shares is about 33.78 million for AMD, about 13.51 million for each of Broadcom, Micron and Microsoft, and about 6.76 million for TSMC Partners.
For Nvidia, it not only obtains revenue by selling AI chips to Anthropic and its cloud service partners, but will also further become a shareholder of Anthropic. Previously, the relationship between Anthropic and Nvidia was not as close as that of other AI companies. But as Anthropic continues to expand its computing power demand, the business interests of the two sides are further intertwined.
In addition to Nvidia, Google and Microsoft are also important participants in AI infrastructure, while AMD, Broadcom, Micron and TSMC cover links such as AI chips, custom accelerators, storage and semiconductor manufacturing.
The common feature of this group of investors is that their businesses are closely related to AI computing power infrastructure.
Anthropic is still making large-scale purchases of computing power at present. According to its IPO documents, Anthropic's cumulative future computing power purchase and lease commitments with partners such as Amazon and Google total about $8.954 trillion (approximately RMB 5.9 trillion).
This amount is far higher than the funds that can be raised through this IPO and private placement. Whether Anthropic can continue to obtain external financing and fulfill its computing power supply has also become an important factor for investors to evaluate its long-term growth prospects.
03. Annualized revenue hits $810 billion, Goldman Sachs expects revenue to exceed $6 trillion by 2030
Before the launch of this IPO roadshow, Anthropic updated its latest revenue performance.
As of October 31 this year, Anthropic's annualized revenue run rate has reached about $810 billion (approximately RMB 5.403 trillion), up $10 billion from about $710 billion on September 30, an increase of about 14% in one month.
Annualized revenue run rate is the full-year scale extrapolated based on recent revenue level, which is not equal to the realized annual operating revenue.
According to the previously disclosed prospectus data, Anthropic's actual operating revenue in the first three quarters of this year reached $332.4 billion (approximately RMB 2.2172 trillion), a year-on-year increase of about 1200%. Among them, the revenue in the third quarter reached about $170 billion (approximately RMB 1.1339 trillion), up more than 1100% from about $14 billion in the same period of last year, while the revenue in the first quarter and the second quarter of this year was about $47 billion (approximately RMB 313.5 billion) and $116 billion (approximately RMB 773.7 billion) respectively.
Anthropic quarterly revenue growth (unit: billion US dollars, source: Reuters chart)
But high growth is also accompanied by huge book losses. In the first three quarters of this year, Anthropic's net loss was about $1.04 trillion (approximately RMB 6.9372 trillion), a large part of which came from the fair value change of convertible notes and derivative liabilities, not all of which are cash expenditures generated from daily operations.
Before Anthropic's listing, Goldman Sachs also introduced its forecasts for the company's future revenue and profitability to potential investors.
According to the information disclosed by the Financial Times, Goldman Sachs expects Anthropic's revenue to continue to grow rapidly in the next few years: its revenue this year will reach $520 billion, more than 10 times that of $46 billion in 2025; it will further increase to $1.36 trillion in 2027, reach $4.42 trillion in 2029, and break through $6 trillion (approximately RMB 4 trillion) by 2030, which is more than 130 times that of 2025.
However, Goldman Sachs also expects that Anthropic's cash flow pressure will continue in the next few years.
Goldman Sachs predicts that Anthropic's operating loss will peak at $404 billion (approximately RMB 2.6948 trillion) in 2027, and it will not turn positive at the operating profit level until 2029, and will achieve an operating profit of about $652 billion (approximately RMB 4.3491 trillion) by 2030.
The improvement of free cash flow will come even later.
Although Anthropic's free cash flow in the first three quarters of this year is positive, Goldman Sachs expects it to have a free cash flow outflow of $128 billion in the fourth quarter, and the annual free cash flow outflow in 2027 will further expand to $657 billion.
It is not until 2030 that Goldman Sachs expects Anthropic's full-year free cash flow to turn positive, reaching $336 billion (approximately RMB 2.2412 trillion).
According to Goldman Sachs' forecast, even if Anthropic's revenue continues to grow rapidly in the next few years, its investment in computing power and infrastructure will still put great pressure on cash flow.
04. Epilogue: $900 billion financing, against $9 trillion computing power commitments
From the perspective of this IPO offering plan, Anthropic is trying to complete a large-scale financing. But compared with its future computing power commitments close to $9 trillion, this financing can only cover a small part of its capital demand.
Anthropic has proved the commercialization capability of its Claude product, and its annualized revenue run rate has increased by another $10 billion in one month. Goldman Sachs also predicts that the annual revenue of this company is expected to exceed $6 trillion in four years.
However, this forecast is based on the premise that Anthropic continues to expand its customer scale, maintains rapid growth, and obtains sufficient computing power support.
As Anthropic enters the public market, investors will be able to continuously verify these growth expectations. If it is successfully listed next week, a valuation of more than $1 trillion will only be its first exam facing Wall Street.
This article is from WeChat Official Account "Zhidx" (ID: zhidcom), written by Jiang Yu, edited by Xin Yuan, published with authorization from 36Kr.