Anthropic's $26 Billion IPO Faces New Test After Nvidia's CEO Exit

Nvidia has committed roughly $10 billion of a $26 billion private placement tied to Anthropic's initial public offering (a share sale to select investors alongside the listing), and that anchor now sits inside a company that just lost its chief executive. Anthropic is expected to list on Wednesday or Thursday of next week, days after Nvidia reports quarterly earnings — the company's first-ever report without Jensen Huang at the helm.

Huang, Nvidia's co-founder and longtime CEO, resigned on Thursday following reports alleging two extramarital affairs: one with a customer whom U.S. intelligence suspects of being a Chinese intelligence asset, and another with an Nvidia executive who reports directly to him. The departure removes one of the industry's most powerful figures and best salesmen from the stage just as Anthropic attempts one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in history.

The listing was already viewed as a stress test for investor appetite for AI. Nvidia is intimately involved: beyond the $10 billion placement disclosed in Anthropic's filings, Anthropic has committed tens of billions of dollars to secure access to Nvidia's most advanced chips. The two companies are tightly bound commercially as well as financially.

What does Huang's exit change for the deal?

Analysts see little chance the IPO gets pulled. Jay Goldberg, an analyst at Seaport Research Partners and one of the few on Wall Street with a sell rating on Nvidia's stock, said: "They're going to go public right in the face of Nvidia's earnings call, and I don't think that derails it. It's such a massive IPO and there's so many people behind it now that they don't pull the IPO."

The bigger risk, in Goldberg's view, arrives after the listing. He warned that turmoil at Nvidia, including the loss of its CEO, would create a headwind for Anthropic when it reports its first quarterly results as a public company. "At the very least it will create this narrative of, 'Can the AI narrative maintain? Can we keep doing this?'" he said. "They'll get much tougher questions."

Karl Alomar, a partner at venture firm M13, agreed that the fundamentals are intact. "From where I stand, Anthropic is still in as good, as strong a position as it was before this news came out," he said. "Anthropic's numbers are fantastic, and they've clearly shown that they have excess capacity for what they need. They haven't spent that much money."

How dependent is Anthropic on Nvidia?

Less than some of its rivals. Anthropic runs some models on Google's TPUs, Amazon's Trainium chips and AMD's GPUs, alongside Nvidia's hardware, and has reportedly explored building its own chips. That diversification limits the direct operational damage from instability at its largest supplier and anchor investor.

Francine McKenna, an accountant and investigative journalist who has taught at the Wharton School, expects the placement to survive. "Nvidia has committed to invest $10 billion in the Anthropic IPO. That will likely still happen when the IPO eventually happens," she said. "But anyone who was looking at Nvidia to bail out CoreWeave if needed should probably look elsewhere."

Scrutiny of the partnership itself is likely to intensify, though. Jason Schloetzer, an associate professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, said he expected "much closer scrutiny of [Anthropic's] ties to Nvidia and customers associated with Nvidia."

Why does one IPO carry this much weight?

Anthropic and competitor OpenAI have consumed so much capital that almost every venture firm in Silicon Valley owns a piece of them — the private market equivalent of an index fund (a portfolio holding a broad slice of the market rather than selected names). That makes next week's listing a high-stakes liquidity event for more than 400 backers of Anthropic and for the AI boom as a whole.

The read-through is binary for many observers. If Anthropic succeeds, the AI boom has far more runway; if it flops or pushes back indefinitely, it would be an unequivocal negative signal that the AI bubble is heading toward a pop.

There is also a possible upside. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has long pushed for tighter controls on chip exports to China, putting him at odds with Huang. The two have also clashed on AI regulation, with Huang keen to avoid licensing requirements that would make open-source AI models harder for customers to adopt.

One venture capitalist, who asked not to be named given the situation's sensitivity and their investments across AI, put it bluntly: "If anything, I think Anthropic is a beneficiary here. They weren't that close to Jensen… They're building their own chip, and so the supply chain considerations that get freed up are good for Anthropic."

For finance teams watching the AI trade, the practical takeaway is sequencing: Nvidia's earnings land first, the IPO follows within days, and the first Anthropic quarterly report as a public company will arrive with far tougher questions attached.