San Francisco, November 11: Artificial Intelligence research lab Anthropic is reportedly looking to raise $64 billion through an initial public offering (IPO) later this month, making it one of the largest public market debuts in financial history.
The proposed public offering will offer 825 million shares of Class A common stock with a price band between $70-$78 per share, regulatory filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) showed. Besides this, Anthropic is also looking to offer 801 million shares to select existing stockholders, reports say. Overall, the company is targeting a $1.4 trillion valuation, according to a Reuters report.
Market insiders following the developments told the Financial Times that the company is aiming to raise as much capital as possible to provision for exploding demand for computing infrastructure. This includes plans to spend about $900 billion on computing capacity and infrastructure over the years. This comes at a time when questions have been raised about the scale of investments in the sector, with no clear route to profitability.
Anthropic’s rival OpenAI has had to scale down its recent fundraising plans, as investors become increasingly wary of the high investment in the sector.
Anthropic had earlier scaled back its ambitions to reach a $2 trillion valuation, at a time when the financial markets had experienced volatility following the US midterm elections, with technology stocks briefly losing $ 3.2 trillion.
Despite taking in new investors, the founding team will continue to carry 50.1% of the general voting power, as the company has been structured in a way that separates the new investors from the founding members, led by Dario Amodei.
