Nvidia’s $10B Anthropic IPO Talks Raise Circular AI Questions

Nvidia may be preparing to sit on both sides of one of the biggest AI money stories yet.

Anthropic is reportedly in talks to bring Nvidia in as an anchor investor for a possible initial public offering that could raise as much as $100 billion and value the AI company at around $2 trillion. Reuters, cited by MarketScreener, says Nvidia is considering investing up to $10 billion, although the discussions are still private and could change.

On its face, this is a simple vote of confidence. Anthropic is one of the most closely watched AI companies in the world, and Nvidia is the company whose chips have become the backbone of modern AI training and inference. But the possible investment also raises the same question that keeps following the AI boom: how much of this money is new demand, and how much of it is the same ecosystem financing itself?

Nvidia sells the expensive chips that AI companies need. AI companies raise money to buy or rent more compute. Cloud providers build data centres filled with Nvidia hardware. Nvidia invests in parts of that same ecosystem, which can help those companies scale and, indirectly, support demand for more Nvidia hardware. None of this is automatically wrong, but it does make the financial structure of the AI boom more complicated.

Anthropic is already a major buyer of AI compute from Nvidia-powered clouds and other infrastructure partners. If Nvidia becomes a major anchor investor in Anthropic’s IPO, investors will have to examine the relationship carefully. The question will not only be whether Anthropic’s models are strong, but whether the economics of running them can justify a valuation that would be extraordinary even by Big Tech standards.

TechBooky has written about this circular AI finance concern before, including the way large cloud, chip and model deals can make growth look stronger while also making the ecosystem more financially tangled. The reported Anthropic talks would be another major example of that trend.

There is also a strategic angle. Nvidia does not want the AI market to slow down, and it benefits when the most important model companies have the capital to keep buying compute. Anthropic, for its part, would gain a powerful signal to public-market investors if the world’s most important AI chip company became an anchor backer.

Still, a $2 trillion valuation would invite intense scrutiny. Anthropic would need to convince investors that revenue, customer retention, enterprise adoption and safety positioning can support the kind of market value usually reserved for the largest technology companies on earth. Nvidia’s presence could help. It could also make the circularity question harder to ignore.