Anthropic Quietly Joins the IPO Line

Anthropic filed confidentially for an IPO on Monday, according to a company blog post. The move puts the AI lab — valued at $965 billion — into what is shaping up to be a major IPO season.

Nearly a trillion dollars for a company founded in 2021.

The filing is confidential, which means Anthropic gets to evaluate its options without exposing its financials to the public — or to competitors. No share count, no price range, nothing. When and if it files a full S-1, the real numbers will emerge.

According to TechCrunch, Anthropic raised $65 billion in a Series H round less than a week before the confidential filing. That round was co-led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, and D1 Capital Partners. The timing suggests institutional investors were loading up in anticipation of a public offering.

Anthropic's revenue run-rate has reportedly surpassed $47 billion, up from $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to TechCrunch. The acceleration rivals the growth rates of most public companies.

Meanwhile, rival OpenAI raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion post-money valuation and is also expected to file for an IPO. Two AI labs, both near trillion-dollar valuations, both heading for public markets at roughly the same time. This market faces a stress test not seen since the dot-com era.

SpaceX is also in the IPO queue, targeting a $2 trillion valuation and looking to raise more than $75 billion, per TechCrunch. The IPO pipeline right now is unprecedented in scale.

The Connection Between the Headlines

Most outlets are covering Anthropic's IPO and Schroepfer's fund as separate stories. The real connection is power—electricity and the physical infrastructure that makes any of this possible.

AI data centers currently consume 4% of total U.S. electricity, according to The Next Web citing utility planning data. That number could hit 9% by the end of the decade. U.S. utilities plan to spend $1.4 trillion by 2030 just to meet AI data center demand.

Natural gas turbines — the default backup power source — have waitlists stretching into the early 2030s. The grid simply cannot keep up.

This energy crunch sits beneath both Monday headlines.

Schroepfer's $250M Bet

Former Meta CTO Mike Schroepfer — known as "Schrep" in Silicon Valley — closed his firm Gigascale Capital's first institutional fund at $250 million, per TechCrunch and confirmed by The Next Web, Tech Funding News, and TechBuzz. This is Gigascale's second fund overall but the first backed by institutional investors rather than Schroepfer's personal capital.

Schroepfer ran Meta's technical infrastructure from 2013 to 2022. He knows what it costs to power a global platform at scale. He's not guessing about the energy problem — he lived it.

The fund focuses on energy, grid infrastructure, critical minerals, and what Gigascale calls "physical AI" — the hardware-software integrations that determine whether industrial technology actually deploys at speed.

The portfolio already includes heavy hitters. Commonwealth Fusion Systems has raised $863 million from investors including Nvidia, Google, and Bill Gates, and is building commercial fusion reactors. Form Energy builds 100-hour iron-air batteries for grid-scale storage. Heron Power, led by former Tesla SVP Drew Baglino, raised $140 million for grid infrastructure technology. Radiant is approaching commercial deployment of nuclear microreactor technology in the U.S., according to Tech Funding News.

These are not consumer apps. These are companies building the physical backbone of the digital economy.

"The companies we back win because they're cheaper, faster, and more reliable," Schroepfer said in a statement. "Climate impact is the result of better-performing systems."

Schroepfer is not pitching this as a values-driven ESG play. He's pitching it as pure economics. Solar went from 40 gigawatts of annual deployment to 600 gigawatts in a decade — because it got cheaper, per Tech Funding News citing Sightline Climate data.

What the Media Is Getting Wrong

Most coverage frames Schroepfer's fund as a contrarian climate bet, with the implicit suggestion that it's ideologically motivated.

This is a supply-and-demand play. AI needs power. Power infrastructure is bottlenecked. Companies that solve the bottleneck make money.

Early-stage climate VC participation fell 11% in 2025, according to Sightline Climate data cited by Tech Funding News. But total climate tech investment still reached $40.5 billion globally, up 8% year-over-year. The small investors fled. The smart money stayed.

Coverage of Anthropic's IPO filing is overwhelmingly framed around AI industry competition — Anthropic vs. OpenAI, who goes public first, which valuation holds. The deeper question nobody is asking publicly: at $965 billion, is Anthropic's valuation defensible once public market investors demand profitability timelines?

OpenAI and Anthropic combined have raised hundreds of billions of dollars. Neither has disclosed a profit. That's fine in private markets where investors price on future potential. Public markets are less patient.

What This Means for Regular People

If you pay an electric bill, you're already paying for AI's power appetite — and that bill is going higher. The grid buildout required to support AI data centers runs into the trillions of dollars. That cost doesn't vanish. It flows to ratepayers and taxpayers.

If you're an investor, the Anthropic IPO will be one of the most scrutinized offerings in history. When the S-1 comes, watch the numbers: burn rate, path to profitability, and customer concentration. Near-trillion-dollar valuations demand hard answers.

And if Schroepfer is right — that the companies solving the power crunch will be the real winners of the AI boom — then the energy infrastructure plays may end up being better investments than the AI labs themselves.

The companies building the infrastructure often outlast the innovators competing for the same power supply.