The book is multiple times oversubscribed. Bankers are quietly discussing a price above the range. And then, Wednesday night, Nvidia’s board sat down to decide whether to remove Jensen Huang.
That is the collision fund managers are navigating this week. Anthropic’s amended S-1, filed November 10, proposes a price range of $70 to $78 per share for 825 million Class A shares. Pricing is expected November 18, with trading set to begin November 19. Bloomberg reported the book is already multiple times oversubscribed. The Financial Times separately reported that bankers were weighing a price increase after strong early investor demand. On its own, that would be a straightforward IPO story. It is not, right now, a straightforward week.
The Anchor Problem
Seven companies are buying about $26 billion of non-voting Class N shares in a private placement. Google and Nvidia each take about $10 billion, followed by AMD at about $2.5 billion, then Broadcom, Micron, and Microsoft at about $1.0 billion each, with TSMC at about $500 million. The two $10 billion commitments are not incidental. They are the architecture of the deal’s credibility. Nvidia’s investment signals that the world’s dominant AI chip supplier believes Anthropic’s compute spending will keep growing. If Nvidia’s board removes the man who made that call, institutions buying ANT next Thursday are left with a question they cannot currently answer: does the commitment survive a leadership change?
Huang has said he has more than 60 direct reports, underscoring the tight control he maintains over the company. CFO Colette Kress, who has held the role for more than a decade, would be a natural choice as an interim CEO, though analysts say the bigger question is who would lead Nvidia’s technology roadmap longer term. There is no clean answer. Several Wall Street analysts told media outlets that if Huang is removed, the stock could fall another 20% or more, given how critical he has been to Nvidia’s success. Nvidia shares also fell more than 8% in after-hours trading Wednesday.
What the Bulls Are Still Saying
Evercore ISI’s Julian Emanuel, the firm’s chief equity and quantitative strategist, said Wednesday that Nvidia remains a core part of their AI basket and that he expects the Anthropic IPO to go smoothly. That framing reflects the institutional view that the two stories are separable: Nvidia’s governance crisis is about Huang personally, not about GPU demand, not about Anthropic’s supply chain, and not about the $10 billion placement commitment, which is a contractual obligation, not a discretionary decision for a new CEO to revisit on day one.
Anthropic also has a deal with Microsoft to scale Claude on Microsoft Azure, powered by Nvidia, and Anthropic has committed to purchase substantial Azure compute capacity. The bull case, in short, is that institutions are buying Anthropic’s revenue trajectory and market position, not Jensen Huang’s LinkedIn profile.
What Investors Are Missing
The overlooked risk is not that Nvidia pulls the $10 billion. It almost certainly will not. The risk is timing and sentiment. Nvidia shares fell more than 8% after hours to around $159 on Wednesday night, and the company has lost hundreds of billions of dollars in market value over the past week as the story developed. A deal priced into AI euphoria, absorbing headline risk from the sector’s most important company, in the same week that company may change CEO, is a window that can close faster than anyone expects.
Anthropic’s filing shows 2025 revenue of about $4.6 billion and $33.2 billion for the first nine months of 2026, and the company cautions investors not to assume comparable growth rates will persist. The price range would value Anthropic at up to about $1.4 trillion on a fully diluted basis. That valuation reset was already a concession to market reality before this week’s Nvidia drama arrived.
Stocks to Watch
- Anthropic / ANT: The direct bet. Book coverage is real, but the final price is set November 18, after however many more days of Nvidia headlines.
- Nvidia / NVDA: Shares fell sharply in after-hours trading as investors grappled with the possibility of the company without Huang at the helm. The governance outcome this week matters as much to Anthropic’s debut as anything in the roadshow.
- Alphabet / GOOGL: Google is a $10 billion participant in the private placement. Anthropic’s post-IPO trading could still matter for sentiment around Alphabet’s AI posture, but the specific claim about a roughly $132 billion stake and quarterly other income swings is not supported by Anthropic’s IPO filing.
- Microsoft / MSFT: Committed about $1 billion in the placement and is part of Anthropic’s cloud and infrastructure strategy. A rougher-than-expected ANT debut would reflect on MSFT’s AI ecosystem bets too.
