Anthropic has picked its exchange. The artificial-intelligence company has selected Nasdaq for its initial public offering, according to a Business Insider report on September 13 that Bloomberg, CNBC, and Reuters subsequently confirmed. The choice moves one of the year’s most closely watched listings a step closer to reality.
The timing is aggressive. Anthropic is aiming to begin its roadshow in mid-October and to list before the November midterm elections, according to people familiar with the plans. The company is targeting a valuation near $2 trillion and a raise of more than $60 billion. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Citigroup are on the underwriting list.
The numbers behind the filing explain why the listing has drawn so much attention. Anthropic’s second-quarter revenue grew roughly fourteenfold from a year earlier to $11.5 billion. Its annualized revenue reached $65 billion by the end of July, up from $9 billion at the close of 2025. The company’s gross margin, before partner distributions to Amazon and model-training costs, sits above 80 percent.
The Financial Times reported the same day, citing people familiar with the matter, that Anthropic has told some shareholders it expects a second consecutive quarter of adjusted operating profit. That measure excludes stock-based compensation. Short seller Jim Chanos and others have questioned the metric, arguing that stripping out a real cost overstates the health of a business still burning through capital.
The compute commitments behind that growth are just as aggressive. The Information, tallying Anthropic’s public contracts, calculated that the company has locked in roughly $517 billion of computing capacity over eleven months. Among those deals is a six-year, $13.7 billion agreement with RUM Group, tied to a data center in Maysville, Georgia, with about 120 megawatts of power that is expected to come online in early 2027.
The RUM deal also gave Anthropic warrants to buy 50.8 million Class A shares at one cent apiece. RUM’s stock jumped more than 20 percent in premarket trading after the arrangement came to light. The warrants illustrate how the AI boom has turned power and data-center operators into some of its largest beneficiaries.
Anthropic’s growth puts it in a small group of companies whose revenue has scaled this fast. The jump from $9 billion of annualized revenue at the end of 2025 to $65 billion by July is the kind of curve usually reserved for consumer platforms, not enterprise software. The company has done it by selling access to models through cloud partners, with Amazon among the largest distribution channels.
That distribution model is also the reason the gross margin figure needs a footnote. Partner payouts and the cost of training run large, and the company subtracts them before presenting margin. Investors will spend much of the roadshow deciding how much of the headline number is durable profit and how much is the cost of the growth itself.
The choice of Nasdaq over the New York Stock Exchange carries some weight in a market where the two venues compete for technology listings. Nasdaq has long positioned itself as the home of growth companies. The venue matters less to investors than the numbers above it, but it closes a question the market had been asking for months.
The listing arrives at a delicate moment. Anthropic’s chief executive, Dario Amodei, published an essay over the weekend arguing that the industry must slow down its frontier models. That essay helped trigger a global selloff in AI-linked shares on Monday, led by memory and equipment makers. The company’s own bankers will now have to reconcile its founder’s warnings with a pitch for a $2 trillion valuation.
The underwriting list is itself a signal. Four of the largest US banks are attached to the deal, and a raise above $60 billion would rank among the biggest offerings on record. The fees alone will be substantial, and the banks have every incentive to keep the deal on schedule, even as the market absorbs a selloff.
Analysts said the offering will test how much the market is willing to pay for a business growing at an unusual rate while spending at a rate that is hard to model. The dispute over adjusted profit is a preview of the accounting questions investors will raise during the roadshow. Whether the company can convert its revenue momentum into a clean listing before the elections is the open question.
The company has given itself little room for error. A mid-October roadshow leaves only weeks for the market to settle from Monday’s selloff. If the deal gets done on schedule, it will be one of the largest technology offerings in US history.
The listing is also a statement about the durability of the AI trade itself. Anthropic is asking public investors to value a business that, by its own founder’s account, may be moving too fast. The market’s answer will arrive within weeks, in the form of a price.
