Nvidia Weighs $10 Billion Investment in Anthropic

Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang speaks at the G20 innovation ministers' meeting in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on Feb. 2. Reuters-YonhapNvidia is considering investing about $10 billion (13.5 trillion won) in artificial intelligence company Anthropic. Anthropic hopes to raise up to $100 billion in its initial public offering, including from Nvidia, at a valuation of about $2 trillion (2,700 trillion won).

Reuters reported on the 13th, citing multiple sources, that Anthropic is in talks with Nvidia over such a large-scale investment. Nvidia's participation in the IPO would be significant in that it secures a strategic investor for Anthropic ahead of the public offering.

The anchor investor role Nvidia would take on refers to an institutional investor that commits to buying a portion of the offering before the process is formally under way. Nvidia and Amazon served as anchor investors in the IPO of chip designer Arm, while Saudi Arabia's Public Investment Fund backed SpaceX as an anchor investor.

Nvidia said in November last year that it would invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, and Anthropic agreed to purchase $30 billion worth of Microsoft Azure computing capacity that runs on Nvidia chips.

As demand for Claude has strained its computing capacity, however, Anthropic is diversifying its chip supply chain to address shortfalls while continuing to rely on Nvidia's graphics processing units. In April, it said it would spend more than $100 billion over 10 years with Amazon Web Services to use more than 1 million Amazon Trainium2 chips.

Separately, the Financial Times reported the same day that Anthropic told shareholders it would post a profit this quarter. The disclosure was seen as an attempt to ease investor concerns over aggressive cash burn at AI companies. Anthropic told a small group of shareholders that adjusted operating profit would be positive for a second consecutive quarter.

Second-quarter revenue was $11.5 billion (15.5 trillion won), up 14-fold from a year earlier. Annualized revenue as of the end of July — July revenue extrapolated over a full year — reached $65 billion (87.5 trillion won), up sharply from $9 billion (12.1 trillion won) at the end of last year. Anthropic's gross margin was estimated at more than 80% before accounting for revenue shared with distribution partners including Amazon and model training costs.

"We forecast Anthropic's annualized revenue at $120 billion (161.5 trillion won) by the end of this year and nearly triple that by the end of next year," said Joy Brookhart, an analyst at SemiAnalysis. "Calls to slow the pace of AI development could save money, but they may allow competitors to close the gap." Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at a post-money valuation of $965 billion (1,300 trillion won).