Anthropic plans to raise up to $100 billion in IPO, scale may exceed SpaceX record

The company founded by Dario Amodei plans to raise at least as much as SpaceX's record $86 billion IPO in June; Reuters reports that the firm behind the Claude chatbot could raise up to $100 billion, surpassing SpaceX.

Meta's massive share sale delivers at least one new signal: investors are willing to commit big money to the AI theme. The Facebook parent sold $38 billion of common and preferred stock, above its initial target, and plans to raise another $60 billion through directed share issues starting next year. Chip giants Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom will subscribe for a small portion, but the market will bear most of the absorption burden. Even so, Meta shares fell less than 2% after the news landed on Monday.

The credit market initially absorbed the financing needs of AI capital spending, and now it is equity investors' turn to take up the baton. Consultancy Yorkville Ives notes that Meta's "debt-financing phase has come to an end," with its long-term borrowings rising to $81 billion in the third quarter from just $29 billion a year earlier.

Another large tech equity financing landed this month: Schneider Electric raised €6 billion ($6.7 billion) to fund its $23 billion acquisition of U.S. software firm PTC. The deal is enormous for both the French company and the European market, and counts as a standout result against a backdrop of sharply rising financing costs in France.

These epic equity deals look like good news for Anthropic. But a seasoned blue-chip company issuing new shares is not the same thing as an IPO. Meta and Schneider are well-known names, and existing investors have ample reason to add to positions when a favored company sells stock at a discount. An IPO, by contrast, is the ultimate test of risk appetite. Even with Anthropic's current "must-own asset" halo, the decision to buy or not rests with investors, who need to free up cash to participate.

Moreover, the IPO environment has deteriorated compared with when SpaceX listed: the U.S. 10-year Treasury yield has risen from 4.5% to 5%. SpaceX's share price has slightly outperformed the broader market, but most U.S. IPOs this year have fallen short of expectations, with average gains of just 2%; data-center operators' IPOs have been especially dismal.

Anthropic's revenue is growing rapidly, but its valuation logic is harder to grasp than SpaceX's. SpaceX has a mature rocket-launch business and a profitable Starlink communications business that continuously funds Musk's AI ambitions. As with SpaceX, retail money will also underpin demand for Anthropic.

Will the impact be confined to Anthropic itself, or will it spill over into the broader market? A reasonable question is whether equity investors can withstand yet another enormous financing demand. U.S. capital markets are the deepest in the world, but liquidity is not infinite. The money asset managers use to subscribe for new shares comes either from fresh client inflows or from selling existing holdings. In June, before SpaceX's offering, the top ten S&P 500 constituents almost all edged lower—perhaps a signal that investors were freeing up cash.

Some equity strategists, after tracing fund flows, remain optimistic about the market's capacity to absorb supply. On one hand, tech giants such as Meta and Alphabet have shifted from buybacks to share issuance, turning from returning cash to the market into draining liquidity; but buybacks by companies in other sectors have offset this, and the buyers are not only direct beneficiaries of AI capital spending such as Nvidia and Micron.

Deutsche Bank strategists believe this wave of equity issuance stems from robust buying demand, and that the pace of new share supply will slow but will not end the stock market rally.

Goldman Sachs research shows that historically large IPOs have only put short-term pressure on the stock market; over the past 30 years, in the weeks around mega-IPOs, the S&P 500 on average held flat before resuming its climb. Goldman analysts said: "We do not expect the new supply of shares to end the bull market in the near term," noting that corporate equity financing this year amounts to just 1% of total U.S. stock market capitalization.

Theoretically, the market can digest this giant new share supply. But Anthropic is ultimately an IPO, and its performance will be shaped by sentiment and variables. Everyone needs to watch it, because this deal has become a symbol of the AI trade—and the AI trade is the core of today's market.