News & Updates
The latest news and updates from companies in the WLTH portfolio.
Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO could test the limits of AI mania
Anthropic might soon test how much Wall Street actually believes in the artificial-intelligence boom. The Claude maker is nearing decisions on key banking roles for an IPO that investors expect to value the company at $2 trillion or more, according to the Financial Times. Morgan Stanley (MS) seems likely to take the "lead left" position, while Goldman Sachs (GS) will oversee stabilization after trading. That would be an amazing price, even by AI norms. Anthropic raised $65 billion in additional cash in May, when it was valued at $965 billion. That would mean a public value of $2 trillion, a gain of almost 107% in a few months. And that's the whole tale. Anthropic isn't only getting ready for an IPO. It may be asking public investors to bless one of the quickest valuation increases in business history. Anthropic's $2 trillion number changes the IPO stakes Morgan Stanley has been discussing share prices with potential Anthropic investors, according to the Financial Times, but its lead role is still unclear. JPMorgan Chase (JPM), Citigroup (C), and Barclays (BCS) should also gain significant positions after financing Anthropic. The "lead left" position is important because the bank in the position often has considerable influence on the price, the allocation of investors, and the overall marketing of the offering. But the banks are vying for more than status. Anthropic's $2 trillion valuation would beat the $1.77 trillion value SpaceX obtained when it went public in June, establishing a new record for the IPO market. SpaceX priced its initial offering at $75 billion, but that later grew to $85.7 billion after underwriters exercised their overallotment option. Anthropic itself has moved with surprising speed. The corporation raised $30 billion at a value of $380 billion in February, Reuters reported. A $65 billion round in May put its valuation at $965 billion. At the time, Anthropic estimated its run-rate revenue at more than $47 billion. That implies Anthropic's private value has tripled more than three times since February. Wall Street is betting AI can support another historic IPO The IPO would come at a crucial time for equities in artificial intelligence. SpaceX's blockbuster launch demonstrated investors' appetite to sustain a huge value partially based on aspirations for AI. Anthropic could now be able to take that excitement even further. There's a second award for Wall Street, too. Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs are also seen vying for top spots in OpenAI's eventual IPO, the Financial Times said. Landing a high berth on Anthropic might bolster either bank's status as one of the major advisors to the nascent generation of trillion-dollar AI startups. But Anthropic's value is a hard bar to clear. It's been just a few months, yet investors would be paying more than double the company's May value of $2 trillion. That means growth forecasts matter. Anthropic's revenue in July was at an annualized pace of approximately $65 billion, below some investors' more bullish estimates of nearly $80 billion. The competition is heating up, too, as OpenAI has unveiled a new flagship model, with both businesses racing to snatch corporate and developer clients. Bloomberg / Getty Images Anthropic's IPO timeline is already shifting One significant element has changed since the Financial Times first reported the story. The FT indicated Anthropic might publish its prospectus as early as September and begin trading around late September or early October, but Reuters later reported that the timing had slipped. Anthropic is now scheduled to file its prospectus in late September, start promoting the offering around mid-October, and perhaps finish the listing just ahead of the U.S. midterm elections in November. The corporation is also closing on an around $15 billion revolving credit facility that includes Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citigroup, according to Reuters. It provides the banks with additional financial ties to Anthropic even before the IPO begins. Anthropic could become Wall Street's biggest AI test yet The temptation is to see Anthropic's IPO as another marker of the AI boom. That's what makes the value something other than that. The $2 trillion price tag would require public market investors to back a corporation that was valued at $380 billion in February and $965 billion in May. But that doesn't mean investors will pass it up. Anthropic's revenue growth, its technology being adopted by companies like Amazon's AI unit, and the fact that it is able to raise huge sums of cash all point to unusually high demand for its technology. But an IPO transforms the crowd. The private investors are counting on years of growth ahead and can pay high prices. At some point, public investors want to see on a quarterly basis that those expectations are being fulfilled. That's why Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs could be pushing so hard for the top spots. Anthropic may be one of Wall Street's most renowned transactions. It might also be the most transparent test yet of how far investors will drive the AI boom until pricing itself becomes the danger. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published September 8, 2026 at 5:03 PM.
Exclusive-Anthropic IPO launch shifts toward mid-October, sources say
Sept 4 - Anthropic is expected to begin marketing its initial public offering in mid-October at the earliest and complete the listing days before the U.S. midterm elections in November, people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The artificial intelligence company had been expected to make its IPO prospectus public as early as next week, two of the people said, a crucial step that would kick off the final stages of the offering. Now that is not expected until late September, the people added, cautioning that the plans, including the timing, are subject to change. The shift pushes back what some investors have said could be a $2 trillion listing, one of the largest IPOs ever attempted and a major test of public-market appetite for the rapidly growing artificial intelligence industry. Companies frequently adjust their IPO schedules as they work through market conditions, regulatory reviews and other preparations, so such changes are not unusual. As part of the IPO process, Anthropic is looking to finalize a $15 billion revolving credit facility, after which analysts, including those at banks involved in the financing, are expected to meet with the company, one of the people said. Bloomberg News earlier reported that Anthropic was in talks to expand the facility to $15 billion. Companies typically leave a few weeks between analyst meetings and making the IPO prospectus public, although Anthropic is expected to have a tighter window because analysts already know the company well, the person said. Anthropic declined to comment. The offering is expected to be one of the most closely anticipated IPOs ever, as investors look to public markets for exposure to the rapidly growing artificial intelligence industry. It could come alongside potential listings from other AI companies, including OpenAI. Elon Musk's SpaceX went public in June at a record $1.77 trillion valuation. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Citi are among the banks working with Anthropic on the IPO, according to people familiar with the matter. Goldman Sachs, Citi and JPMorgan declined to comment. Morgan Stanley did not immediately respond to a request for comment. (Reporting by Echo Wang in New York; Additional reporting by Milana Vinn; Editing by Colin Barr and Sanjeev Miglani) Copyright Reuters or USA Today via Reuters Connect This story was originally published September 4, 2026 at 4:48 PM.
Anthropic signs $35 billion cloud deal with Nvidia-backed Lambda, source says
Aug 31 (Reuters) - Anthropic has signed a cloud-computing deal worth $35 billion with Lambda, a cloud provider backed by Nvidia, a source familiar with the matter said on Monday. The deal will bring online Nvidia capacity to meet growing demand for Anthropic's Claude AI, the source said. The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal. (Reporting by Chandni Shah in Bengaluru and Natalia Bueno Rebolledo in Mexico City; Editing by Subhranshu Sahu) Copyright Reuters or USA Today via Reuters Connect This story was originally published August 31, 2026 at 6:50 PM.
Anthropic's $45B cloud deal points to its IPO
Anthropic just made one of the largest infrastructure commitments in AI history, and the timing is hard to ignore. The company agreed to spend roughly $45 billion renting cloud computing power from Nscale, a UK-based AI infrastructure firm. The deal runs six years and covers about 460 megawatts of power at Nscale's flagship data center development in West Virginia. For investors, this matters because Anthropic is preparing to go public, and this agreement tells you a lot about the case it plans to make. Why Anthropic's Nscale deal points straight at its IPO Anthropic is still private, but not for much longer if current reporting holds up. The company submitted a confidential IPO filing to the Securities and Exchange Commission in June and has started meeting with potential investors, CNBC reported. Investors expect Anthropic to go public in October at a valuation of $2 trillion or more, which would make it the largest IPO in history, Quartz reported. That is where the Nscale agreement comes in. When Anthropic pitches Wall Street, one of the first questions it will face is whether it can keep growing without running out of the hardware and electricity its Claude models need. This deal is designed to answer that question before anyone asks it. How Anthropic has assembled its computing infrastructure will feature prominently in what it tells prospective public-market investors. What 460 megawatts and Vera Rubin chips actually buy The hardware here is worth understanding, because it explains why the price tag is so large. The West Virginia facility will run on Nvidia's next-generation Vera Rubin chips, which are expected to start coming online at the end of 2027, TechCrunch reported. Vera Rubin is Nvidia's newest system, and it combines six different chips working together at the cutting edge of chip design. The 460 megawatts of power involved is enough to supply about 345,000 US homes at once, according to Bloomberg, which shows the scale of what modern AI training now requires. Here is what the deal locks in for Anthropic: Key terms of the Anthropic and Nscale agreement * Total value: Roughly $45 billion over six years, averaging about $7.5 billion a year * Capacity: Approximately 460 megawatts of power * Location: Nscale's Monarch campus in West Virginia * Hardware: Nvidia Vera Rubin systems, online in late 2027 SOPA Images / Getty Images How this fits Anthropic's wider spending run The Nscale deal is not a one-time move. It follows a series of large agreements Anthropic has signed to lock down capacity. Earlier this month, the company signed a $10 billion, six-year deal with Volta for a data center in Norway, TechCrunch reported. In July, it added a $5 billion computing-related agreement with AMD. And back in May, Anthropic entered a large arrangement with SpaceX that reportedly provides about $1.25 billion worth of capacity each month. There is a reason for all of this activity. Anthropic acknowledged earlier this year that heavy demand for Claude had strained its existing systems and caused reliability problems during peak hours. By spreading its work across Nvidia chips, AWS Trainium, and Google's processors, Anthropic avoids depending on any single vendor. What the numbers say about Anthropic's growth Anthropic surpassed OpenAI in quarterly revenue for the first time in the second quarter, posting $11.6 billion, more than double its first-quarter total, Bloomberg reported. Its annualized revenue run rate climbed from about $9 billion in late 2025 to more than $47 billion in May and near $65 billion by July. The pitch to investors leans on an even bigger figure. Anthropic is preparing to tell IPO investors that its total addressable market tops $30 trillion, based on the full scope of work AI models could perform across industries, the The Wall Street Journal reported. That claim has drawn skepticism. NYU finance professor Aswath Damodaran is widely known as the dean of valuation for decades of work breaking down company worth. He said a similar AI market estimate from SpaceX was "reaching the end of what's plausible and pushing beyond," BetaNews reported. The risks investors should weigh before the IPO First, there is timing. The West Virginia facility will not come online until late 2027, so this is a long-term backup plan rather than a fix for today's capacity shortage. Before then, Anthropic has to bridge the gap using its existing arrangements with Amazon, Google, and SpaceX. Second, there is the question of profit. A $45 billion commitment to one partner adds to already enormous obligations. Investors will want to see that revenue growth can outpace these costs over time, not just for a quarter or two. Third, the valuation itself is unproven. Anthropic's last private raise valued it at $965 billion in May, according to according to Briefs.co, so a $2 trillion debut would roughly double that mark within months. What this means for investors You cannot buy Anthropic shares yet, but you can prepare. If the IPO arrives this autumn, treat the pitch figures with care. A $30 trillion market claim is a projection, not a guarantee, and Anthropic's own forecast of $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028 revenue would capture under 1% of that market. Watch three things once the filing lands: * Whether revenue keeps doubling * Whether adjusted profit holds up under audited numbers * Whether these capacity deals turn into reliable service instead of more strain. The Nscale agreement shows Anthropic can secure the power and chips it needs. Whether it can turn that into durable profit is the question that will decide if a $2 trillion price tag holds up once investors get their first real look. Investors don't need to wait for the IPO to get exposure to this story. Every one of these deals runs on Nvidia hardware, and rivals like AMD are fighting for a share, which keeps AI infrastructure names firmly in focus heading into the debut. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 28, 2026 at 6:33 PM.
US judge blocks Pentagon's Anthropic blacklisting
August 27(Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Thursday blocked the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic, the latest turn in the Claude maker's high-stakes fight with the military over AI safety on the battlefield. Anthropic's lawsuit in California federal court alleges that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth overstepped his authority when he designated Anthropic a national security supply-chain risk, a label the government can apply to companies that expose military systems to potential infiltration or sabotage by adversaries. Hegseth's unprecedented move, which followed Anthropic's refusal to allow the military to use AI chatbot Claude for U.S. surveillance or autonomous weapons, blocked Anthropic from certain military contracts. Anthropic executives have said it could cost the company billions of dollars in lost business and reputational harm. Anthropic says that AI models are not reliable enough to be safely used in autonomous weapons and that it opposes domestic surveillance as a violation of rights, but the Pentagon says private companies should not be able to constrain military action. U.S. District Judge Rita Lin, an appointee of former Democratic President Joe Biden, made the ruling in a 59-page order where she found that the Pentagon's decision was "illegal and baseless." "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," she wrote. Anthropic's designation was the first time a U.S. company has been publicly designated a supply-chain risk under an obscure government-procurement statute aimed at protecting military systems from foreign sabotage. In its March 9 lawsuit, Anthropic alleged the government violated its right to free speech under the First Amendment of the Constitution by retaliating against its views on AI safety. The company said it was not given a chance to dispute the designation, in violation of its Fifth Amendment right to due process. The lawsuit says the decision was unlawful, unsupported by facts and inconsistent with the military's past praise of Claude. The Justice Department countered that Anthropic's refusal to lift the restrictions could cause uncertainty in the Pentagon over how it could use Claude and risk disabling military systems during operations, according to a court filing. The government said the designation stemmed from Anthropic's refusal to accept contractual terms, not its views on AI safety. Anthropic has a second lawsuit pending in Washington, D.C., over a separate Pentagon supply-chain risk designation that could lead to its exclusion from civilian government contracts. (Reporting by Jack Queen in New York; Editing by Noeleen Walder and Matthew Lewis) Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect. This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 7:41 PM.
US judge rules Pentagon blacklisting of Anthropic unlawful
WASHINGTON, Aug 27 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge ruled on Thursday that the Pentagon's blacklisting of Anthropic was unlawful. "The undisputed record shows that the challenged actions constituted unlawful retaliation in violation of the First Amendment, and that Anthropic was denied the pre-deprivation process required under the Fifth Amendment," U.S. District Judge Rita F. Lin wrote in a ruling. "The record further shows no material dispute that Secretary Hegseth's decision to designate Anthropic a supply chain risk violated the governing statutory scheme...and was arbitrary and capricious." (Reporting by Christian Martinez and Jasper Ward) Copyright Reuters or USA Today via Reuters Connect This story was originally published August 27, 2026 at 7:22 PM.
Salesforce raises annual revenue forecasts, expands AI partnership with Anthropic
Aug 26 (Reuters) - Salesforce lifted its full-year revenue forecast and announced an expanded partnership with AI giant Anthropic on Wednesday, sending the enterprise software company's shares up 14% in extended trading. The companies' new "Claudeforce" initiative will integrate Anthropic's Claude AI models across Salesforce's workplace applications, building on their June partnership where an AI agent was added to the business software company's Slack app. Salesforce has been gaining traction with AI-powered tools and autonomous agents that can automate sales, service, and marketing tasks - an area the company sees as a major growth driver for the future. "We're seeing incredible demand for our AI and data products, with annual recurring revenue about to cross $4 billion," said CEO Marc Benioff. Products such as Headless 360 and Slackbot have created new ways for users to access traditional Salesforce applications and data, helping customers extract more value from their information, said Rebecca Wettemann, CEO of industry analyst firm Valoir. The company now expects fiscal 2027 revenue between $46.1 billion and $46.4 billion, compared with its prior outlook range of $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion. It also raised its annual adjusted earnings per share forecast to be between $16.67 and $16.71, reflecting a reduction in share count, from its earlier outlook range of $14.06 to $14.12 apiece. Salesforce sees third quarter revenue in the range of $11.42 billion to $11.5 billion, slightly above analysts' estimates of $11.41 billion. Revenue for the second quarter ended July 31 grew 11% to $11.35 billion, compared with analysts' expectations of $11.32 billion. (Reporting by Juby Babu in Mexico City; Editing by Leroy Leo) Copyright Reuters or USA Today via Reuters Connect This story was originally published August 26, 2026 at 2:14 PM.
Anthropic makes quiet move Nvidia investors must consider
Amir Salek spent four years doing something that looked a lot like walking away from the chip business. After founding and running Google's Tensor Processing Unit program from 2013 to 2022 and shipping seven generations of the custom silicon that now powers much of Google's AI infrastructure, he left to invest in deep-tech startups at Cerberus Capital Management, a press release announced at the time. That detour is why his next move matters more than a routine hire. Anthropic has brought Salek onto its compute team, where he will report to compute lead James Bradbury, according to Bloomberg. He is not being poached out of a rival's office. He is being pulled back into chip design after four years on the sidelines by a company that did not have a hardware team a year ago. Salek is not Anthropic's first hardware hire this year Two months earlier, Anthropic landed Clive Chan, the second engineer ever hired to OpenAI's custom chip program, who had spent more than two years building the Broadcom-designed inference accelerator OpenAI markets as Jalapeno. Chan announced the move himself in June, framing it as a step up rather than a rescue. The pattern is what makes the Salek hire read as strategy instead of opportunism. Anthropic publicly confirmed on Aug. 5 that it is standing up an in-house silicon team, with the explicit goal of co-designing chips and Claude models together to cut inference costs by roughly half, according to TechCrunch. TechCrunch also reported that Anthropic has held early manufacturing talks with Samsung. Two hires in three months, both pulled from the two companies furthest along in custom AI silicon, is not a coincidence. It is a shopping list. Javier Zayas Photography / Getty Images Raiding Google's bench Here is the part most coverage of the Salek hire has skipped past. Google is not a bystander in Anthropic's chip ambitions. It is the supplier. Anthropic agreed in October to buy up to a million of Google's Tensor Processing Units in a deal worth tens of billions of dollars, then expanded that arrangement in April to cover multiple additional gigawatts of TPU capacity through 2027, according to the company's announcement. Google is, in other words, simultaneously arming Anthropic with chips after losing the person most responsible for the chip program that those chips came from. That is an unusual position for a supplier to hold with a customer that competes directly against its own Gemini AI models. It complicates the idea that the relationship is simply commercial. Anthropic still says AWS Trainium, Google TPUs and Nvidia GPUs will remain central to how it scales Claude, and nothing about Salek's hire changes that in the short run. For investors in Nvidia, Alphabet and Broadcom, the practical impact today is limited, since custom silicon takes years to design and manufacture at volume. But each AI lab that builds its own silicon program shrinks the list of frontier customers still fully dependent on Nvidia. Broadcom, which already designs custom chips for OpenAI and Google, is the most likely beneficiary if Anthropic's effort advances that far. The real contest has moved from GPUs to headcount Bidding wars over AI researchers are old news by now. What's newer is the fight over hardware architects, the engineers who can take a chip from blueprint to production line. There are far fewer of them than machine learning researchers, and that scarcity is starting to show. That scarcity has already produced legal fights in other industries. Warner Bros. Discovery sued Amazon in July over an executive who left a fixed-term contract 16 months early, arguing Amazon ran what its complaint called a lawless hiring spree. Salek's move to anthropic carries none of that risk. He had already left Google's payroll years before Anthropic called, which means there is no contract to breach and no lawsuit to file. That is the quieter lesson here. The clean way to build a chip team is not to raid a competitor mid-contract. It is to identify who already built one of these programs once, wait until they are between roles, and make the offer before anyone else does. The custom silicon race Meta's in-house Iris chip is due in production by September. OpenAi's Jalapeno targets the back half of this year. Microsoft has run Maia chips for two years, and Amazon has done the same with Trainium. Anthropic is the last major lab into custom silicon, not the first. Owning hardware talent is not the same as owning working silicon. Anthropic's chip, whatever it becomes, is not expected before 2028 at the earliest. The next test is not who Anthropic hires next. It is whether a lab built on renting other companies' chips can actually ship one of its own. As frontier AI labs and hyperscalers double down on in-house silicon, a critical question emerges for Wall Street: Does this mark the beginning of structural market share erosion for Nvidia? While Nvidia's total addressable market continues to expand rapidly, every successful custom ASIC deployed for inference or specialized training shifts workloads away from general purpose GPUs, slowly chipping away at the revenue concentration of the market's leading chipmaker. The Arena Media Brands, LLC THESTREET is a registered trademark of TheStreet, Inc. This story was originally published August 23, 2026 at 5:33 PM.