$960 Billion: Anthropic Beats OpenAI to the IPO Filing in a Race That Could Reshape AI Investing

$960 Billion: Anthropic Beats OpenAI to the IPO Filing in a Race That Could Reshape AI Investing Omor Ibne Ehsan Thu, June 4, 2026 at 11:10 PM GMT+7 5 min read ANTH.PVT AMZN NVDA CRM MSFT Quick Read Amazon (AMZN) booked $17 billion in pre-tax Anthropic gains in Q1, and a $960 billion IPO would force another public revaluation of its stake. Alphabet (GOOGL) holds a direct Anthropic stake, and NVIDIA (NVDA) supplies Claude s GPUs, giving both compounding upside if the IPO prices near $960 billion. Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Amazon didn t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today. Four days. That is the gap between Anthropic closing a $65 billion Series H round at a $960 billion post-money valuation and the company confidentially submitting draft IPO paperwork to the SEC, according to Bloomberg Businessweek s Ed Ludlow. That speed alone tells you something about how AI capital markets are operating right now. In March, the same company was worth $350 billion after a $35 billion Series G. Two months later it filed to go public at nearly triple that mark. The filing is ahead of OpenAI, which was expected to file confidentially last Friday or Monday but has not yet done so. For retirement-focused investors who own the AI buildout through public proxies rather than late-stage private rounds they cannot access, the relevant question is straightforward. Who on the public side captures the upside if Anthropic prints a trillion-dollar IPO this fall? The cleanest answer starts with Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Anthropic s largest strategic backer and compute partner. The anchor figure is $960 billion, the post-money valuation Anthropic carried into its confidential S-1 filing, a level that makes it the world s most valuable AI startup excluding SpaceX after its XAI merger. That figure is a private-market mark, not a public IPO price, and the company disclosed no details about offering size or price range. Polymarket traders are pricing the timing carefully. Odds of an IPO by September 30, 2026 sit at 46%, and rise to 89% by December 31, 2026, with 1-2% probability of a June or July listing given standard SEC review windows. The same market shows 98.8% conviction there is no IPO by June 30, which is what you would expect from a confidential draft that still needs a public filing and a roadshow. Amazon is the cleanest public expression of this trade, and the financials already show it. In the quarter ending March 2026, Amazon recorded $16.80 billion in pre-tax investment gains tied to Anthropic inside Q1 net income. That single line item helped lift Q1 26 net income to $30.25 billion, up 76.65% year over year, and pushed EPS to $2.78 against a $1.73 estimate. So a chunk of Amazon s reported earnings strength is, mechanically, a mark-to-market on the same private valuation now headed for the public tape. If Anthropic prices anywhere near $960 billion at IPO, Amazon s stake gets revalued again, in public, with a daily quote attached to it. The compute side matters more. Anthropic is set to secure up to 5 gigawatts of current and future Amazon Trainium chips, which routes a meaningful share of Claude training and inference spend through AWS. That shows up in the cloud numbers. AWS revenue hit $37.59 billion in Q1, growing 28% year over year, the fastest pace in 15 quarters, at a 37.7% operating margin. Act now: the analyst who called NVIDIA in 2010 just named his top 10 AI stocks — and Amazon didn t make the cut. Grab the names FREE today. Meanwhile, Amazon s chips business, covering Graviton, Trainium and Nitro, topped a $20 billion annual revenue run rate with triple-digit year-over-year growth. CEO Andy Jassy framed it directly. "AWS is growing 28% (our fastest growth in 15 quarters) on a very large base, our chips business topped a $20 billion revenue run rate (growing triple digits year-over-year)." The capex side ties it together. Amazon s 2026 capex plan stands at roughly $200 billion, and Polymarket pegs the probability that Amazon exceeds $190 billion in 2026 capex at over 90%. The bull case for Amazon is that the company is simultaneously the cloud landlord, the silicon vendor and the equity holder for what is now the most valuable AI startup outside of SpaceX. Each of those three legs go up if the Anthropic IPO prices at or near its $960 billion mark. The strategic logic extends beyond Amazon. Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) is the other major Anthropic backer and has its own AI flywheel. GOOGL is up 14% year to date and 116% over one year. Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) is in the picture too, with Claude scaling on Azure, while NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) supplies the GPUs and just reported $81.6 billion in Q1 FY27 revenue, up 85% year over year, with Data Center at $75.25 billion. And Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) holds a stake in Anthropic now worth about $5 billion. The valuation jump from $350 billion in March to $960 billion in late May is the reason a bear case exists, and

$960 Billion: Anthropic Beats OpenAI to the IPO Filing in a Race That Could Reshape AI Investing

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