Anthropic Sets $70-$78 IPO Price Range at 6x Oversubscription as Nvidia Loses $600 Billion in Record Weekly Rout

Anthropic set its IPO share price range at $70 to $78 on November 13, targeting a valuation of roughly $1.33 trillion to $1.4 trillion ahead of an expected Nasdaq debut on November 19 under the ticker ANT. The order book has drawn roughly six times the available shares, with one account putting total demand at 500 percent above supply, and bankers are exploring pricing above the stated range that could lift the fully diluted valuation beyond $1.5 trillion. Combined public proceeds and a concurrent private placement could exceed $90 billion, which would make it the largest IPO in history.

CEO Dario Amodei made the case for the offering in a livestreamed fireside chat with JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, saying the company's primary motivation was building a cash buffer large enough to keep funding computing infrastructure. Amodei described compute as the company's "deepest business dilemma," explaining that Anthropic buys capacity conservatively on the low side and uses spot-market purchases in periods of strong performance, likening the approach to an insurance policy. His stated goal for the offering was to "underpromise and overdeliver," and he cautioned against letting a company be valued above what it is genuinely worth. Former Goldman Sachs executive Gary Cohn called the listing "a bellwether moment" for markets. One notable restriction: Anthropic is rebuffing share orders from institutional investors based in mainland China and Hong Kong, a decision Bloomberg attributed to US-China tensions.

The Anthropic debut arrives as Nvidia concluded its worst week in more than 18 months, shedding between $573 billion and $657 billion in market capitalization after Jensen Huang resigned as CEO following reports of an extramarital affair with Alice Huang, who is alleged to have ties to Chinese intelligence. Colette Kress, Nvidia's longtime chief financial officer who had repeatedly pushed back on Huang's riskier financing commitments, was named interim CEO. The Nvidia board told CNBC it has not yet selected a search firm for a permanent replacement, though the Financial Times reported that Arm Holdings CEO Rene Haas, a former Nvidia employee, has been approached as a candidate. Nvidia stock fell roughly 13 percent for the week, its sixth consecutive weekly decline and the longest losing streak since 2012, pushing the company below Apple in market value and erasing approximately 30 percent of its capitalization over the six-week stretch.

A separate Bloomberg report revealed that a firm founded by Alice Huang procured export-restricted Nvidia H100 and H200 chips that ended up installed in a Shanghai data center through Singapore-based entities, deepening the geopolitical dimensions of Huang's exit. Research published the same day by a group led by former OpenAI researcher Will DePue claimed that leading Chinese open-weight models from DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, MiniMax and Ant Group show fingerprints of training on Nvidia Blackwell GPUs barred from export to China, though the researchers noted the chips could reside in offshore data centers rather than within China's borders. Retail investors appeared undeterred by Nvidia's slide, buying a reported $1.96 billion of the stock during the week, the most since March 2025, with Vanda Research expecting the total to top $2 billion.

The Federal Reserve added a macro note of caution in its semi-annual financial stability report, flagging that 87 percent of surveyed market contacts now cite AI as a salient risk to financial stability, up from 50 percent in the spring. Advanced-computing debt issuance reached $680 billion through October, five times the 2023 total and now equal to 31 percent of nonfinancial investment-grade bond supply, while off-balance-sheet obligations including lease commitments and take-or-pay contracts exceed $3 trillion. The Fed also flagged that AI enthusiasm has helped push asset valuations to elevated levels, and that hedge fund leverage has reached its highest recorded level since 2013.