Dan Ives said that Anthropic’s potential valuation of around $1.2 trillion is a “positive development” for the sector heading into next week.

  • Boloor said that he would rather see Anthropic “leave room to bid the stock up aggressively than shoot for the moon on day one and risk a lukewarm reception.”
  • Anthropic plans to offer 825 million shares at $70 to $78 apiece, which means Anthropic could raise as much as $64.4 billion.
  • According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the company plans to start trading Thursday or Friday next week.

Dan Ives, partner and senior managing director at Yorkville Ives, said on Tuesday that pricing Anthropic’s (ANT) shares at roughly $1 trillion is the correct approach amid recent tech-sector volatility.

“A deal of this size gets one shot at its debut, and making it digestible for the market matters more than the last turn of valuation,” Ives wrote, calling the step a positive development for the sector heading into next week.

Shay Boloor, chief market strategist at Futurum Equities, echoed the opinion and said targeting roughly $1.02 trillion, barely above the $965 billion private valuation from May, is prudent. “I’d rather see Anthropic leave room to bid the stock up aggressively than shoot for the moon on day one and risk a lukewarm reception,” he wrote.

Moorhead Dismisses Circular Financing Concerns

The prospectus filed Tuesday outlined an IPO of 825 million shares priced between $70 and $78 apiece, which could raise between $57.8 billion and $64.4 billion. A concurrent $26 billion private placement at the IPO price includes $10 billion each from Google and Nvidia (NVDA), $2.5 billion from Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and smaller stakes from Broadcom (AVGO), Micron (MU), Microsoft (MSFT), and TSMC (TSM).

Together, the IPO and private placement could raise about $90.4 billion. The prospectus does not state a valuation for Anthropic. Based on the roughly 16.9 billion fully diluted shares implied by the company’s October filing, the proposed price range of $70 to $78 would value Anthropic at approximately $1.2 trillion to $1.3 trillion.

Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy said the scale of the fundraising highlights the enormous capital needs of the AI business.

He also noted the October 31 run-rate revenue of about $81 billion, up $10 billion in a month, against up to $900.9 billion in mostly compute purchase and lease commitments, observing that major suppliers are buying stock in their customer.

“I said $2T was hard to imagine and $1.5T a stretch. This came in under both. Chips, memory, foundry and cloud are buying stock in their customer. It's only circular if nobody pays for the product, and $81B says somebody is,” Moorhead said, dismissing concerns of circular financing caused by an overlap between Anthropic’s investors, suppliers and customers.

According to a report by The Wall Street Journal, the company plans to start trading Thursday or Friday next week. The IPO follows SpaceX’s record debut earlier in June. SpaceX raised a record $85.7 billion in its June IPO, valuing the company at about $1.77 trillion at the offer price and ranking as the largest IPO ever.

On Stocktwits, retail sentiment around ANT was 'neutral' at the time of writing. 

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