Nvidia and Alphabet Just Agreed to Buy $10 Billion Each of Anthropic Stock at Its IPO Price
Anthropic has set the terms for its initial public offering (IPO), with an expected price between $70 and $78 a share for 825 million shares. The artificial intelligence (AI) firm plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker “ANT.”
The amended filing also added something its earlier version didn’t have. Seven firms agreed to buy a combined $26.0 billion in Anthropic shares in a private placement at the IPO price. At the $74 midpoint, Nvidia (NVDA +2.87%) and Alphabet’s (GOOGL +2.11%)(GOOG +2.00%) Google each account for about $10.0 billion of that.
The deal comes in a tough patch for Nvidia’s stock, which traded below $170 as of this writing, more than 30% under its 52-week high.
But I think the investment says less about Nvidia’s chip sales than its size could suggest.
Image source: The Motley Fool.
What $10 billion buys
At $74, Nvidia gets 135,135,135 shares of Anthropic’s Class N stock, which generally carries no vote. The purchase is sized in dollars, so if the IPO prices at $70, Nvidia’s $10 billion buys around 143 million shares, and at $78, about 128 million. Either way, that’s about 1% of the roughly 13.1 billion shares Anthropic expects to have outstanding afterward.
The placement closes just after the IPO, subject to conditions including approval by Anthropic’s stockholders.
Anthropic’s revenue surged to $33.2 billion from January through September, from $2.5 billion a year before. In 2024, it pulled in $386 million, and in 2025, $4.6 billion. Its operating loss over those nine months also shrank to $1.3 billion from $5.2 billion.
Is the check tied to chip sales?
The filing links two of the seven purchases to earlier deals. Google’s purchase uses up, in full, an option it has under a March 2026 financing agreement, funding part of an investment it had already committed to make. And the $2.5 billion from Advanced Micro Devices counts toward a $5.0 billion stock-purchase commitment that came with a July supply deal for AMD’s Helios rack-scale systems.
Nvidia’s purchase has no such link in the filing.
Nvidia did pledge in November 2025 to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic, along with Anthropic’s commitment to use up to one gigawatt of computing capacity on Nvidia systems at first, and some of that cash went to Anthropic’s February 2026 funding round. But the filing doesn’t say if this purchase draws on that pledge.
Anthropic does run on Nvidia hardware, of course. It trains and serves its Claude models on four chip families: Amazon’s Trainium, Google’s tensor processing units, and graphics processing units (GPUs) from both Nvidia and AMD. Its Nvidia GPU capacity comes through a partnership with Nvidia plus rental deals with cloud providers like Lambda and Nscale.
Anthropic also says using several chip families “reduces dependence on any single vendor.”
Nvidia can easily afford it
Of course, $10 billion is a far smaller bet for Nvidia than for most companies.
At the close of its last reported quarter, the chipmaker had $56.6 billion in cash and marketable debt securities. And its free cash flow in the first half of the fiscal year was almost $70 billion, up around 77% year over year.
Nvidia also already owned $99 billion in equity investments at the end of July, and these stakes now move its reported profit. Gains on equity securities added $23.7 billion to pre-tax income in the first half. Nvidia’s non-GAAP (adjusted) results strip these gains out, which is probably a big reason its earnings per share in the fiscal second quarter of 2027 (the three months ended July 26, 2026) were $2.46, over the $2.22 adjusted number.
When Anthropic is public, this stake might add to these swings, in either direction.
NVDA – Nvidia
$173.73+$4.84 (+2.87%)
NASDAQ · As of 4:00 PM ET 11/11/26
But the investment doesn’t change what drives the business. Nvidia’s year-over-year revenue growth has accelerated three quarters in a row, from 62% in the fiscal third quarter of 2026 to 106% in fiscal Q2. Nvidia posts its fiscal Q3 results on Nov. 17, and management expects revenue of around $108.0 billion, or about 89% growth.
The stock, meanwhile, trades at around 21 times earnings. Against analysts’ estimates for its next fiscal year, which ends in January 2028, the price is about 11 times earnings. I’d say that’s a modest price for a company whose revenue just more than doubled.
Overall, the Anthropic stake looks like a sound use of Nvidia’s cash. But it’s small next to Nvidia’s own business, and the filing doesn’t link it to a single chip order. For shareholders, the stock still depends much more on Nvidia’s own chip sales than on this check.
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Source: www.fool.com — article syndicated from the publisher’s feed; all rights remain with the original publisher.