Nvidia weighs up to $10 billion stake in Anthropic's reported $2 trillion IPO

Nvidia is considering an investment of as much as $10 billion in Anthropic's upcoming initial public offering, according to Bloomberg, which on September 11 relayed a Reuters report based on anonymous sources. The same reporting says Anthropic's IPO is aiming to raise up to $100 billion at a valuation of around $2 trillion — a listing that, if it reaches that scale, would be the largest IPO in history, potentially matching or beating SpaceX's record.

The numbers, pulled apart

The story mixes several figures that are easy to conflate. As laid out in a dev.to write-up summarising the reporting:

• Nvidia's potential commitment: up to $10 billion, framed by Bloomberg as a ceiling rather than a fixed amount.
• Anthropic's fundraising target for the IPO: up to $100 billion.
• Anthropic's implied valuation at listing: roughly $2 trillion.
• Anthropic's previous round: $65 billion raised in May 2026 at a $965 billion valuation.

The last line is the one worth dwelling on. The IPO target valuation is more than double the May figure, set just four months later.

Why Nvidia would write this cheque

The dev.to analysis offers two readings, and both can hold at once. The first is straightforward return: if Anthropic lists near $2 trillion, an anchor investor that bought in before the listing secures pre-market pricing on a stake in the sector's fastest-repricing asset.

The second is the customer loop. Bloomberg's report does not spell this out, but as the write-up notes, the common interpretation in the industry is that much of this money would flow straight back to Nvidia in the form of chip purchases. Nvidia has run a comparable playbook with OpenAI before, and The Economist titled a September 3 analysis “Nvidia is the central bank of AI” — financing its own customers so those customers can buy its own products. Each such deal makes the question of who is really the customer harder to answer.

A two-month spending streak

Placed beside Nvidia's other recent moves, the reported Anthropic stake fits a pattern. Per Bloomberg's Nvidia news tracker, cited by the write-up: on September 1 Nvidia invested in MediaTek, sending that company's shares up 10 percent; on September 3 it agreed to buy Hugging Face for $129 billion. In August, Bloomberg covered a reported $500 billion Nvidia fundraising plan in terms of AI mania gripping Wall Street. The dev.to author reads this sequence less as proof of a bubble than as a signal that money in the sector is circulating faster than ever.

Safety messaging in the same week

The timing adds a layer of tension. One day after the Nvidia report, on September 12, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei published an essay, “We Must Pace the Frontier”, arguing for a slower pace of AI development. The same day, Sam Altman told Fortune that OpenAI would not go public this year, calling it an “ill-advised moment” given safety concerns. Meanwhile, The Guardian reports Anthropic is expected to begin marketing the IPO as early as mid-October and complete the listing before the US midterm elections in November.

Still just talks

Every number above should be read as a target, not a settled fact. The report rests on unnamed sources via Reuters, with Bloomberg passing it on. Neither Nvidia nor Anthropic commented, and Reuters stressed that the plan remains under discussion and could change. As the dev.to author puts it, this is negotiation, not agreement.

Why it matters

A $10 billion cheque sounds enormous, but against a $100 billion raise it is one tenth — an anchor position rather than a controlling bet. The structural question it opens is larger: when the chipmaker funds the model builders, and the model builders spend that money on the chipmaker's silicon, how well do valuations on both sides reflect genuine demand rather than a loop? That question breaks no rules, but it is the one anyone reading AI IPO coverage should keep asking, because if the loop ever stops it stops for both sides at once. It is also hard to miss that the company whose CEO just called for slowing the frontier is simultaneously preparing what could be the largest stock listing in history to fund it.