Nvidia Is Weighing a $10 Billion Stake in Anthropic's IPO. It Would Be Buying Its Own Demand.

Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) might be gearing up to write Anthropic a second $10 billion check.

The chipmaker's in talks to be an anchor investor in Anthropic's planned initial public offering (IPO), Reuters said this month, a deal that could deepen its ties to a major customer. A source put Nvidia's possible investment at up to $10 billion.

The artificial intelligence (AI) company behind the Claude models is reportedly looking to raise as much as $100 billion in a listing that might value it at roughly $2 trillion. Reuters has since said that the IPO may slip past the U.S. midterm elections in November. Of course, the plans might still change, and neither company has confirmed the talks.

What would Nvidia get for the money?

Image source: Nvidia.

Two $10 billion checks

The first check was directly tied to Nvidia's hardware. In November 2025, Nvidia said it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, along with up to $5 billion from Microsoft. Anthropic, in turn, committed to buy $30 billion in Azure computing capacity. And its first deal with Nvidia covered up to 1 gigawatt of compute on Nvidia's Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems.

Later, in March, CEO Jensen Huang said the $10 billion Anthropic investment would probably be Nvidia's last in the company. His reason for a similar call on OpenAI was that it was "going to go public."

The check would buy a sliver of Anthropic

At a $2 trillion valuation, $10 billion is around half of 1% of the company. That's a big chunk of the offering (a tenth of a $100 billion raise), but a small slice of the business.

Nvidia's done this before. It was one of 10 cornerstone investors in chip designer Arm Holdings' 2023 IPO. Together, the group indicated interest in buying up to $735 million in stock at the IPO price and on the same terms as other buyers.

If Anthropic's deal works like that, Nvidia's cash would buy the same stock, at the same price, as everybody else. The main bonus, I think, is the signal. An early pledge from a backer this big might reassure other buyers.

But the reported talks don't involve anything like 2025's hardware commitment, at least so far. And Anthropic has been spreading its compute dollars around. It's lined up as much as 5 gigawatts of new capacity from Amazon, and 5 gigawatts of capacity based on tensor processing units (TPUs) from Alphabet's Google. It's also building a team to design its own chips, while saying it'll still use several suppliers' hardware, Nvidia's included.

Anthropic said money from its latest funding round would partly go toward expanding compute to meet demand for Claude. Money from an IPO might go the same way, and some could come back to Nvidia through the Nvidia-based computing capacity Anthropic pays for.

So I think Nvidia would be buying its own demand -- and paying to stay close to a customer that's buying from rivals, too.

Nvidia keeps buying stakes

For Nvidia, $10 billion is a small sum. Over the three months ended July 26 (its fiscal 2027 second quarter), it earned $59.7 billion, more than twice its year-ago profit. And revenue growth accelerated to 106% year over year, up from the previous quarter's 85% rate.

Checks like this are adding up even faster. Nvidia carried its stakes in private companies on its books at $47.9 billion as of July 26. That compares to $22.3 billion in late January, when its fiscal year started, and just $3.8 billion a year earlier. Including public holdings, the company's equity investments came to $99 billion as of July 26, with another $25 billion committed.

In other words, its private stakes rose over twelvefold in a year when quarterly revenue about doubled.

So Nvidia's investment gains and its sales now depend on the same thing: AI spending. If that spending cooled, Nvidia could face smaller orders and markdowns on its stakes at the same time.

In the end, I don't think a $10 billion check changes much about Nvidia by itself. It's around a sixth of a quarter's profit, and keeping a major customer close is arguably money well spent.

At about $225 as I write, shares cost about 14 times expected earnings for fiscal 2028 -- a fair price for a company growing so fast, in my view.

I'd just watch how big that investment portfolio gets.

Daniel Sparks and his clients do not have positions in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Alphabet, Amazon, Arm Holdings, Microsoft, and Nvidia. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.