Amodei Tells Dimon Compute Is Anthropic's 'Deepest Business Dilemma' Five Days Before IPO Pricing

Since Anthropic set its IPO price range at $70 to $78 per share in a filing on Tuesday, Nov. 10, the company has moved into full sales mode. Today, Nov. 13, CEO Dario Amodei went on a livestream with JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and addressed the biggest open question in the deal: how much computing power to buy.

Amodei called it the company's "deepest business dilemma." The problem, as he laid it out, is forecasting. Anthropic has to decide years ahead how much compute to purchase without knowing how fast the technology will turn into revenue.

"Because this field is growing so fast from a technological perspective, and we don't know how that is going to transfer to the creation of economic value on the business side, we have this huge uncertainty," Amodei said.

The $900 billion question

The prospectus puts a number on it. Anthropic has committed to roughly $900 billion in infrastructure investments, with about half due by 2030.

Amodei described the two-sided risk. Buy too much and costs could outrun revenue. Buy too little and the company can't serve customers or fund research on its next model. "It's a very difficult problem," he told Dimon.

He pointed to two buffers. One is gross margin, meaning how much revenue the company squeezes from each unit of compute. The other is cash: the prospectus shows more than $95 billion in cash and cash equivalents as of Sept. 30, plus another $36 billion in short-term investments. IPO proceeds come on top of that.

Amodei said the strategy is to buy "relatively little" compute in advance. If demand runs hotter, he said, the company can use that cash to buy capacity on the spot market. "For periods of time where things don't go as well, we're well covered, and we're well insulated," he said.

Those are the CEO's assurances. The $900 billion commitment figure comes from the company's own filing, and the two sit side by side.

The deal itself

The offering is 825 million shares. At the top of the range, that is up to $64.35 billion in proceeds and a fully diluted valuation of about $1.4 trillion. That compares with the $965 billion valuation from the May funding round.

Per CNBC's reporting, the company plans to price on Nov. 18 and list on Nasdaq on Nov. 19 under the ticker ANT. CNBC also reported, citing people familiar with the matter, that Anthropic is targeting retail investors for about 20% of the offering. That is well above the typical 5% to 10%.

Separately, Anthropic has agreed to sell $26 billion of Class N common stock in a private placement to AMD, Broadcom, Google, Micron, Microsoft, Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. The price matches the IPO price. Those shares are unregistered and carry no underwriter lock-up.

The prospectus is blunt about the technology's risks. Anthropic says some of its models have shown "behavior resembling blackmail." It also warns that a single incident could "generate significant public concern, regulatory scrutiny, litigation risk, or reputational harm, regardless of whether such behavior results in actual harm."

Market backdrop

The valuation has already come down from earlier ambitions. CNBC reported that Anthropic had been eyeing $2 trillion until recently. One shareholder told CNBC that even $1.5 trillion is a "stretch."

The pressure traces to the week of the midterms. On Thursday, Nov. 5, the Nasdaq Composite lost $2.5 trillion in value, its biggest single-day dollar drop on record. Markets had hit highs the day before, after Democrats won Congress.

Voters also elected candidates critical of data-center development, and statewide ballot measures passed that could slow AI buildout. The Wall Street Journal reported that three major investors planning to take part in the IPO said the valuation would have to come down from $1.5 trillion.

Mike O'Rourke, chief market strategist at JonesTrading, told CNN he expected Anthropic to come to market, but "likely" at a lower valuation. The $70 to $78 range implies roughly the $1.4 trillion level, below the $1.5 trillion figure that analysts had forecast.

Speculative markets have swung back toward confidence. Before the sell-off, traders on Kalshi put the odds of an IPO this month above 90%, and they fell to 60% on Nov. 5. Injective has now launched a pre-IPO market on Anthropic. It prices a Nov. 19 debut at 93.3% YES, and puts a 43.5% chance on a market cap between $1.25 trillion and $1.5 trillion at the close. Those are bets by traders, not an offering by the company.

What comes next

The range is not final. Underwriters can still adjust price or size before the Nov. 18 pricing, and the SEC's review of the registration statement stands between the company and a Nov. 19 listing.

The unresolved question is whether the demand Anthropic is trying to build with a 20% retail allocation and a $64 billion raise holds through the weekend. It will have to hold five days ahead of pricing, after the week's rate and inflation worries and the midterm results rattled AI stocks.