Anthropic is pressing on with its high-stakes public listing even as a brutal tech rout convulses markets, with the Claude maker prepared to accept a valuation well below the $2tn that its most bullish investors had hoped for. The AI start-up plans an initial public offering before the US Thanksgiving holiday this month, according to multiple investors, and expects to raise $80bn-$100bn at a valuation of between $1.25tn and $1.75tn. That is a step up from Anthropic's current $965bn valuation, but well short of the doubled price tag investors had anticipated as recently as a month ago.
"My view is they will price it very conservatively, call it $1.5tn, and go up from there," said one large investor. Others involved in the deal anticipated a lower valuation of around $1.3tn. The scaled-back expectations are part of a wider reckoning across the tech sector, amid worries about rising borrowing costs and AI companies' runaway spending plans. Democrats' sweep of the US midterm elections, partly on promises to impede the construction of data centres, has accelerated the sell-off.
US stocks shed $3.2tn in a day of chaotic trading on Thursday, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 plunging 6.4 per cent on worries about a slowdown in the AI infrastructure boom. Rival OpenAI has struggled to complete its own private funding round, slashing the valuation it seeks from $1.4tn to $1.25tn. Despite the odds of a delay rising on prediction markets, more than half a dozen Anthropic investors say the company still intends to go public, even if chief executive Dario Amodei must accept a price cut.
Anthropic's latest financial data showed revenue growth that had slowed but still jumped almost 50 per cent to around $17bn in the third quarter. The company plans to spend $900bn on computing power and infrastructure over the coming years. Its annualised revenue run rate, omitted from the prospectus, is now around $81bn, up from about $65bn at the end of July, according to people familiar with the matter.
Source: Financial Times Companies · Summarized by HeadlinesBriefing