Anthropic Files for IPO as Meta and SpaceX Join AI Capital Rush

Anthropic did not disclose share pricing or the size of the initial raise, CNBC reported; those details will come later. CNBC said the offering will probably be for tens of billions of dollars, if not $100 billion, given the financial commitments disclosed in the filing. Bloomberg said markets had been choppy in the run-up to the mega-IPO by the first frontier AI lab to try to tap public markets for funding.

Meta Platforms announced plans to raise as much as $95 billion in three steps, CNBC reported. The company plans an additional $22.5 billion of Class A common stock at $642.62 per share, $12.5 billion of preferred shares, and $60 billion no sooner than next year through an at-the-market offering for Class C shares. CNBC reported last week that Meta planned to create non-voting Class C shares as a vehicle for future fundraising.

SpaceX closed a $40 billion debt financing deal for graphics processing units, Elon Musk said, according to CNBC. CNBC previously reported that SpaceX would seek to build exclusively on Nvidia hardware. The company is a rocket and satellite business but also a large AI infrastructure company, CNBC reported. In a post on X, Musk said debt markets had almost entirely shut off access to money for companies without substantial revenue independent of AI data centers, and he said more than 200 neoclouds would face severe failure and consolidation, with some but not many surviving.

CNBC reported that the rush reflects a closing AI funding window and a capital bottleneck: demand for models, agents, chips and data centers keeps growing, but Wall Street is becoming more selective about which companies it will back in the next phase of AI spending. Smaller cloud companies have been at the forefront of that pressure. CoreWeave shares have lost 60% from a year-to-date high of nearly $139 on May 6 and hit a 52-week low just above $51 on Monday before moving higher with the broader market, CNBC reported.

Bulls argue that demand means the compute is needed and current investments will produce positive returns, CNBC reported. Bears argue that capital is being misallocated because AI hype will not be matched by AI profits and predicted compute demand will not materialize. CNBC's Jim Cramer wrote in his Sunday column that he was not giving up on the AI trade, especially for companies that do more than AI. CNBC said Meta's core advertising business gives its Super Intelligence Lab a structural advantage over pure-play AI labs such as Anthropic and OpenAI, and that Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet have similar advantages at the infrastructure layer through enterprise software, e-commerce and advertising.

If lower-quality neoclouds fail for lack of funding, CNBC said that should be a positive for survivors in the long term, though any blowups carry near-term headline risk for investors. Demand would not evaporate if a neocloud went under, CNBC reported, because customers of CoreWeave, Nebius or Iren are seeking gigawatts of compute at prices and services they like rather than those specific providers.