The News
Anthropic set its IPO range at $70 to $78 a share on Tuesday and disclosed that seven companies, AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and TSMC, will buy $26 billion of non-voting shares at the IPO price in a private placement right after the offering. Our story has the numbers.
The View
Read that list again, then look at who Anthropic pays. Its first filing committed it to at least $114.5 billion with Google, $44.9 billion with Microsoft and more than $20 billion with AMD. Its equipment leases with Broadcom carry about $161.2 billion of rent. The deals with SpaceX's AI unit, Nscale and Lambda run on Nvidia GPUs.
So the suppliers are buying a piece of their customer.
Is that a problem? Probably not by itself. I don't think it's sinister. Vendor financing is as old as selling. If you sell a customer billions of dollars of chips a year, owning a little of that customer keeps the orders coming and gives you some of the upside when things go well. Microsoft and Google have been doing a version of this with AI labs for years.
But it is a circle, and I wrote about the start of it back in May. Money goes into Anthropic as stock and comes back out as compute purchases. The suppliers book revenue on the compute side and hold an investment on the other. That works fine while the customer keeps growing.
I have a small stake in this myself. I run small sites that call AI models through their APIs, so my bills go to companies like Anthropic, and Anthropic's bills go to these seven. I'd like the middle of that chain to stay healthy.
What I'd watch for is the headline. You'll hear that Nvidia and Microsoft are buying, and it will sound like a vote of confidence. It is partly that. It's also a company buying shares in its own customer at a price the public sets, with the money coming straight back as orders. Those are two different kinds of demand, and they shouldn't be added together.
The risk shows up if growth slows. Anthropic's revenue grew 47% from the second quarter to the third, and its filing says it expects its growth rate to decline over time. If it slows hard, the suppliers lose part of a customer and take a markdown on the stock at the same time. One bad quarter hits them twice.
Who notices first? Probably the suppliers themselves. They see Anthropic's orders before anyone else does, and as far as I can tell nothing in the placement stops them from adjusting their own spending plans long before a public shareholder hears about it. That's another reason to keep the two kinds of buyer apart in your head.
None of this makes the IPO a bad deal at $74. It makes the order book harder to read. The public offering is the part that sets the price.
Room for Disagreement
Strategic buyers know this business better than any fund manager. If Nvidia and Microsoft want more Anthropic stock at $74, that's real information. Google's piece was already committed under an earlier agreement. And $26 billion is small next to $895 billion of compute commitments, so the circle is a thin slice of the money.
Bottom Line
When you read about demand for the Anthropic IPO, keep the public book and the suppliers apart. The public sets the price. The suppliers are partly buying their own future revenue, and that's worth knowing before you add their names to the bull case.
— Hank