Anthropic’s IPO has drawn more institutional demand in its opening days than SpaceX’s did, six times the shares on offer by Thursday. Yet behind the rush lies a more difficult calculation: whether the Claude maker can justify a valuation of up to $1.4 trillion.Demand for Anthropic’s offering has outpaced the early response to Elon Musk’s SpaceX IPO, according to people familiar with the two share sales cited by Reuters. The order book was twice oversubscribed by the end of Tuesday, the first day of Anthropic’s investor roadshow, and had grown to six times the shares on offer by Thursday. SpaceX’s IPO reached twofold oversubscription by the end of its second day of roadshow.The scale of the response is notable for an offering of this size. Anthropic is seeking to raise as much as $64.4 billion through the sale of 825 million shares, priced between $70 and $78 apiece. At the upper end of the range, the company would be valued at about $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis.The roadshow, which runs through Wednesday, has taken Anthropic and its bankers to prospective investors in New York, Boston and San Francisco. The company is expected to price its shares on Wednesday, ahead of their scheduled Nasdaq debut on November 19 under the ticker ANT.Yet the subscription figures tell only part of the story. Investors are being asked to place a price on a business whose revenue is expanding rapidly but whose position in the future AI market is far from settled.
The challenge of staying ahead
A central concern is whether Anthropic can hold its lead in developing advanced AI models as Google and other rivals accelerate their own efforts. Investors are also looking beyond Claude’s popularity in coding to assess whether the chatbot can establish itself among knowledge workers across a wider range of industries.If several companies develop models of comparable quality, Anthropic could find it harder to maintain premium pricing. Investors are also divided over whether the AI market will ultimately be concentrated among a handful of dominant players or sustain several major competitors.There are questions, too, about how much clarity investors are getting before committing money. One investor who attended a roadshow meeting told Reuters that Anthropic had not provided detailed answers to some questions. Another investor said a group meeting did not include a conference call through which institutional investors could dial in and ask questions, as is customary in roadshows. Representatives of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley largely read prepared remarks at the meeting, the investor said.The biggest differences between investors are emerging in their estimates of how large Anthropic’s business can become. Banks are using projected revenue of $270 billion to $280 billion in 2028 as a key input in their valuation models, according to people familiar with the projections.Sell-side estimates put revenue at about $52 billion to $53 billion in 2026, rising to between $135 billion and $137 billion in 2027. Some investors are more optimistic, with buy-side forecasts running 10% to 15% above those estimates for the two years, according to an investor who has placed an order in the IPO.Some investors are taking a more cautious approach with one investor who conducted due diligence but decided against participating has a 2028 revenue estimate about 30% below the sell-side projection.These differences are significant because the proposed valuation depends heavily on revenue that Anthropic has yet to generate. The company’s current growth is striking: its run-rate revenue stood at roughly $81 billion on October 31, up from $71 billion a month earlier, according to its IPO filing. But investors must decide how much of that momentum can be sustained as competition intensifies.The valuation exercise is complicated by the lack of obvious comparisons. Investors are looking at companies including SpaceX and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike as benchmarks, even though neither offers a direct comparison with an AI model developer.
Growth comes with a huge infrastructure bill
Anthropic’s expansion also depends on access to computing capacity on an extraordinary scale. Its IPO filing lists nearly $900 billion in computing commitments with partners including Amazon and Google’s parent Alphabet. Securing that capacity will be central to the company’s ability to meet future demand, but it also underscores the scale of the resources required to sustain its growth.The wider AI sector is facing scrutiny over whether the money being poured into infrastructure will produce returns commensurate with the investment. A recent technology-stock selloff has added to concerns about spending, financing costs and the possibility that the industry may not deliver on the expectations built into current valuations.Anthropic is seeking a further $26 billion through a separate private placement with cornerstone investors including Alphabet, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices. Along with commitments from investors such as Broadcom, Micron Technology, Microsoft and TSMC, the combined fundraising could reach $90.4 billion.The company was valued at $965 billion in a private funding round in May. Its IPO is therefore a major step up from its last private valuation, even as investors debate how much future success is already priced in.The listing is also being watched as a possible indicator of investor appetite for rival OpenAI, which is seeking to raise $30 billion in what is expected to be its final private funding round before a potential IPO early next year.Anthropic’s early order book suggests that demand for large AI offerings remains robust. The more consequential test, however, will be whether investors remain convinced by the company’s growth assumptions and competitive prospects when the final price is set.