Anthropic to IPO amid Nvidia fiasco

By the numbers: Nvidia recently agreed to purchase around $10 billion of Anthropic shares via a $26 billion private placement concurrent to the IPO. That ties it with Google for the largest investor in that deal, and is in addition to a $10 billion funding commitment that Nvidia made to Anthropic late last year.

• Anthropic also has committed hundreds of billions of dollars to cloud computing deals for Nvidia GPUs, including with SpaceX, Microsoft, Nscale, and Lambda.

Zoom out: There is no indication that Nvidia wouldn't make good on any of its pledges, and the Anthropic IPO is said to be oversubscribed (although we don't know at what price).

• Moreover, Jensen Huang was a very vocal cheerleader for open-source AI, so his ouster could give some boost to closed model makers like Anthropic.

Yes, but: We're obviously in uncharted territory.

• And there's a new WSJ report suggesting that interim CEO Colette Kress was worried that Jensen ventured out over his skis on certain dealmaking.

The bottom line: At the very least, Anthropic IPO investors should view the prospect of future mega-deals with Nvidia as hazy.