Anthropic Has Already Raised $130 Billion Ahead of Its IPO. Here's What Potential Investors Need to Know.

After several years when there was a dearth of high-profile initial public offerings, 2026 has seen an influx of big debuts, including the two largest ones ever: tech titan Space Exploration Technologies and memory maker SK Hynix, which had already been publicly traded for decades in its home market of South Korea, but raised $26.5 billion when it cross-listed on the Nasdaq.

On their heels, artificial intelligence giant Anthropic, the developer of the Claude large language model (LLM), is preparing to go public sometime in late September or October.

That company has already raised a total of more than $130 billion through a series of private funding rounds. In its last funding round this spring, Anthropic raised $65 billion at a price that put its post-money valuation at $965 billion.

Here's what investors need to know.

The biggest IPO ever, again

Anthropic confidentially filed its Form S-1 with the SEC a few weeks ago, and according to reports, it's planning to make its IPO prospectus public after Labor Day, which falls this year on Sept. 7.

Image source: Getty Images.

Sources say the company could aim to raise $100 billion with its initial stock offering, putting it squarely ahead of SpaceX, which raised $86 billion. Anthropic could debut with a market cap of $2 trillion.

Since the prospectus hasn't come out yet, there's scant information about Anthropic's performance. However, Bloomberg reported that its revenue run rate, or the annualized amount it would generate this year based on the current growth rate, was $65 billion in July. That's 6 times what it was a year earlier.

Higher demand means more spending

With that kind of rapid growth, Anthropic continues to scale to prepare for exploding demand, and it has announced several major deals for data center space and compute capacity. As of the May announcement, it had secured a deal with Amazon for 5 gigawatts of computing power, as well as an agreement with Alphabet's Google and Broadcom for another 5 gigawatts of Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) capacity. Broadcom and Google are design partners on the TPU.

Anthropic also has a deal with SpaceX for graphics processing unit (GPU) capacity, and it recently signed two deals with Nvidia-backed cloud providers. Its deal with Nscale is worth $45 billion for 460 megawatts of compute capacity, and its Lambda deal is worth $35 billion.

That's a lot of compute capacity, and that might be just the beginning. Anthropic is angling to present its total addressable market as $30 trillion, and it's getting into position to meet it.

Anthropic has been raising money in several ways, and the IPO will add another source of capital that it can use to develop its infrastructure. Given that the stock market is highly valued, this is an excellent time for high-profile companies to go public, and Anthropic is likely counting on investors' insatiable appetite for thriving AI stocks to help bolster its valuation and fund its build-out.

Jennifer Saibil has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Broadcom, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.