Today’s theme is ‘Cleared for Takeoff’, for better or for worse. It’s what the control tower says when a plane is next in line and the runway is clear. And it fits this AI Tech Wave this week. SpaceX took off first in June, as the first multi-trillion-dollar mega-AI IPO.
Now the other two are lining up: Anthropic, all ready to go and next in line, and OpenAI, not much further off, positioning for takeoff in early 2027.
Meanwhile, the rest of the AI traffic is steering around a stalled craft on the taxiway: Nvidia. Three events and my takes, then the Gadget AI, on Anthropic’s new office tools. It all adds up to the busiest runway in the AI Tech Wave so far.
Anthropic’s IPO is multiple times oversubscribed, per Bloomberg in ‘Anthropic’s IPO Is Said to Be Multiple Times Oversubscribed’. That is what they like to see. The orders are coming in big, anchor size, from both institutional and individual investors, with a big retail component, as I discussed in today’s AI-RTZ #1267. And there’s a big private placement with a number of corporate investors, customers and vendors.
About $90 billion raised, up to $90.4 billion counting the $26 billion private placement from AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC. Together, bigger than SpaceX’s IPO in June, the biggest listing ever, per Bloomberg.
Ticker ANT on the Nasdaq. Pricing next Wednesday, November 18, trading the next day, all ahead of the Thanksgiving holidays.
Still selling: Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder, does a live-streamed event with JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon this Friday. Some investors are already offering slices of their allocations to others.
Some of the biggest winners are already worth trillions. Amazon and Google, early investors, together own more than a quarter of Anthropic. Amazon’s $18 billion investment could be worth over a quarter of a trillion dollars, and Google’s $33 billion about $140 billion, before the IPO is even priced, per The New York Times in ‘Tech’s Biggest Companies Will See a Giant Payday From Anthropic’s I.P.O.’.
The founders: each of the seven keeps a stake worth about $18 billion at the midpoint of the range, and together they hold a guaranteed 50.1 percent of most shareholder votes, per the WSJ.
MP Take: Anthropic is lining up for the takeoff. The haggling is done. It was supposed to be $1.5 to $2 trillion, which is what Anthropic was thinking. The market took it down to $1 to $1.5 trillion. Right now we’re at $1.4 trillion, fully diluted, and we’ll see how the roadshow goes and how the demand really shapes up.
Everything is lined up, with the oversubscriptions, and the $26 billion private deal is the unusual item on top of the IPO component. But those wrinkles aside, this one is done.
Also remember, this will be a public benefit corporation, with a share of its equity set aside for a public benefit fund, unlike what Elon has done. And there is a super-voting tranche, where the seven founders, each worth $18 billion and up on their current holdings, will have a 50.1 percent control stake.
That’s the difference here relative to tech companies of the past, specifically Nvidia, where founder CEO Jensen Huang, under his own set of cloudy issues, doesn’t have super-voting stock or control over his board after 33 years, as I discussed yesterday on ARD #203. Back in June, all three mega-AI IPOs filed for takeoff, with my former firm Goldman Sachs on the lead left of each one.
Sources: Bloomberg, ‘Anthropic’s IPO Is Said to Be Multiple…
