The Anchor Investor Is Also the Supplier
Reuters reported on September 11, 2026 that Nvidia is in talks to invest up to 10 billion dollars as an anchor investor in Anthropic's initial public offering, a raise sources put at roughly 100 billion dollars that could value the company near 2 trillion dollars, potentially the largest IPO in history. Anchor investors commit early to signal confidence and help set the price other buyers pay. Nvidia's willingness to play that role for Anthropic is not new: in November 2025, Nvidia already committed up to 10 billion dollars to Anthropic as part of a broader deal in which Anthropic agreed to buy 30 billion dollars of Microsoft Azure computing capacity, capacity built on Nvidia's own chips.
Anthropic's compute shopping list has grown well beyond that one relationship. In April 2026 it pledged over 100 billion dollars to Amazon Web Services over a decade, built around more than a million of Amazon's own Trainium2 chips, and it has separate multi-gigawatt agreements with Google and Broadcom for TPU capacity.
How the Money Actually Moves
Line up the disclosed commitments and a pattern becomes visible: Nvidia's revenue depends partly on Anthropic buying Nvidia-powered capacity, and Anthropic's valuation now stands to depend partly on Nvidia buying Anthropic equity.
| Commitment | Amount | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Nvidia equity in Anthropic (Nov 2025 + proposed IPO anchor) | Up to 10bn + up to 10bn | Nvidia to Anthropic |
| Anthropic Azure compute (Nvidia-powered) | 30bn | Anthropic to Microsoft/Nvidia hardware |
| Anthropic AWS compute (Trainium2) | 100bn+ over a decade | Anthropic to Amazon |
None of this is illegal or even unusual for the industry; Nvidia has run similar arrangements with OpenAI and Oracle since 2025, and analysts have already flagged the pattern as circular financing, where a chip supplier's investment helps its own customer look larger and more fundable, which in turn supports more chip orders.
What This Means If You Are Evaluating the IPO
Anthropic's underlying growth is real by any normal measure: an annualized revenue run rate that rose from about 9 billion dollars at the end of 2025 to more than 65 billion by late July 2026, with the company itself projecting 190 to 200 billion for 2028. A European pension fund, insurer, or family office weighing a stake in what could be the largest IPO on record should still separate that organic growth from the portion of the valuation story that rests on a supplier investing in its own customer's ability to keep buying its product. The distinction matters most in a downturn: organic revenue growth and supplier-backed anchor investment do not behave the same way if AI infrastructure spending ever slows, and only one of the two survives a pullback in chip demand.
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