Anthropic’s IPO target slides to $1-1.5 trillion from $2T

Anthropic investors now see the company aiming for an IPO valuation of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, down from the $2 trillion target floated in recent months, CNBC reported on November 6, days after voters in the November 3 midterms turned on AI data centers. That range is investor talk. The firm figure is the roughly $895.4 billion of compute and infrastructure commitments in Anthropic’s amended prospectus, and our read of the filing shows about half of it is leases that have not started yet, while $213.8 billion can be terminated or depends on conditions.

Bloomberg put buyer discussions as low as $1.1 trillion earlier in November, a figure that came from a single person familiar with the matter. The Nasdaq suffered its steepest drop in 19 months on November 5, after October was its worst month since March 2025, and CNBC says chipmakers and neoclouds, the GPU-rental clouds most closely tied to the AI buildout, are taking the hardest hits.

CNBC also puts the Nasdaq debut likely in mid-November. That date comes from reporting, not from the filing. As of November 9 the latest document on EDGAR is still the November 2 amendment, which names the ticker ANT on the Nasdaq Global Select Market but leaves the share count blank and the price range reading “between $ and $”. By our inference, a mid-November listing still needs a price-range amendment that has not been filed.

Data centers on the ballot

Local communities opposed data center-related ballot measures in 40 of 41 cases in the midterms. More than half of voters called AI data centers a “crucial” or “major factor” in their vote for Congress, an NBC News exit poll found, and candidates pushing stricter AI regulation won handily in Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Georgia. A University of Southern California survey published November 2 found that 71% of respondents don’t trust big tech companies “at all” to act in society’s best interest around data center development.

Anthropic’s prospectus already counts this as a business risk. It cites New York pausing state permitting for new large facilities and Texas subjecting large electricity loads to curtailment or disconnection during grid emergencies, warns that such moves could delay or prevent the facilities it depends on for compute, and adds:

Opposition to data center development has also become more organized and coordinated across jurisdictions, and our public profile may draw particular attention to projects associated with us.

Dario Amodei called the souring mood a “crisis of trust” in an August post on X, saying people believe companies, the government and the tech industry are always “cooking up some new way to screw them over.” Maura Austin, a behavioral scientist at the University of Virginia, said a listing at such a high valuation leans “into that big tech, billionaire kind of caricature,” and expects that is “not going to go well with the public.”