Anthropic Targets $1 Trillion to $1.5 Trillion IPO as Voters Reject Data Centers

Anthropic's investors see the AI company targeting a valuation of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion for a Nasdaq debut likely to arrive in mid-November, according to a CNBC report published Friday — a figure trimmed from the $2 trillion target floated in recent months. The offering, which would make Anthropic the first pure-play AI company to hit the public market, lands days after American voters delivered one of the sharpest electoral rebukes of the AI industry on record.

The timing could hardly be more hostile. The Nasdaq suffered its steepest drop in 19 months on Thursday, and the index is down to start November after October marked its worst month since March 2025. Chipmakers and neoclouds (cloud providers focused on renting AI computing power) — the companies most closely tied to the AI buildout — are absorbing the heaviest losses.

What did the midterms say about AI?

In Tuesday's midterm elections, voters rejected AI infrastructure while handing Democrats sweeping congressional victories. Candidates who advocated stricter AI regulation won handily in Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Georgia, states that will all now have Democratic governors. Local communities opposed data center-related ballot measures in 40 out of 41 cases.

The scale of the sentiment is measurable. More than half of voters said AI data centers were a "crucial" or "major factor" in their choice of congressional candidate, according to an exit poll from NBC News.

"People don't want a data center going near them if it's just going to house AI that's going to help a big tech company profit," Maura Austin, a behavioral scientist at the University of Virginia, told CNBC. "What Anthropic is doing when they're going public with such a high valuation is they're really leaning into that big tech, billionaire kind of caricature. I expect that's not going to go well with the public."

Why does going public change the scrutiny?

Anthropic has long positioned itself as a safety-conscious company that takes AI's potential risks and benefits seriously. CEO Dario Amodei co-founded the firm with a handful of researchers who defected from OpenAI, now its chief rival. The company is best known for its family of AI models called Claude, and it primarily sells its products and services to other businesses.

That enterprise focus has kept Anthropic out of the role of public face of AI, a distinction left to OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman. An IPO changes the equation. The debut will mint a number of new billionaires and many more millionaires, and it will subject the company to quarterly financial reporting and a level of attention it has never faced.

"Being a public company, just that by itself pushes you in the limelight," Reena Aggarwal, a professor of finance at Georgetown University, said in an interview. "And then AI is such a hot-button issue that Anthropic will be in the limelight even more."

Not every market observer sees the spotlight as a liability. Matt Kennedy, a senior IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital, argued that public markets force greater transparency and that the debut could attract new users. He noted that AI has become such a mainstream conversation topic that several private companies in the sector are already household names.

"I would say that a public company does not deserve more criticisms than a comparable private company," Kennedy said. "So Anthropic should not be put in a harsher public spotlight than OpenAI just because it's public."

Anthropic declined to comment.

How much has Anthropic committed to compute?

The company's exposure to the infrastructure now drawing voter anger is enormous. In an amended IPO prospectus filed this week, Anthropic disclosed purchase commitments and lease agreements with an aggregate committed spend of about $895.4 billion, "substantially all of which is related to compute and infrastructure."

Anthropic and OpenAI depend on state-of-the-art data centers to train models and serve customers, and both are racing to build out capacity to meet demand. Their suppliers — the tech industry's hyperscalers (the largest cloud providers) — have simultaneously boosted their capital expenditure forecasts, each reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The risk is not hypothetical to Anthropic's underwriters. In the risk factors section of its prospectus, the company said opposition to data center development has become more organized across jurisdictions, and that its elevated public profile could draw particular scrutiny to projects associated with it.

Where does the backlash come from?

AI backlash accelerated over the summer after a series of high-profile safety and security incidents rattled the public, and the debate over data centers intensified alongside it. Americans grappling with inflation and stubbornly high gas prices have grown worried that the facilities could exacerbate environmental harms, raise utility bills and contribute to job loss. For many, a proposed data center in their backyard became the physical manifestation of widespread antipathy toward AI.

Nicole Greene, an analyst at Gartner, said she expects Anthropic's executives have long been prepared to contend with AI backlash, given the disruptive nature of the technology.

"There's going to be big emotions," Greene told CNBC. "With big emotions and feelings — fear and excitement — comes heightened scrutiny."

Amodei himself acknowledged the souring sentiment in a post on X in August. He attributed it to a "crisis of trust," writing that people believe companies, the government and the tech industry are always "cooking up some new way to screw them over."

Can Anthropic rebuild public trust while reporting quarterly?

The data on trust is stark. A survey published Monday by the University of Southern California found that 71% of respondents do not trust big tech companies to act in society's best interest "at all" around data center development.

"Once you've lost trust, it's hard to gain it back," Wändi Bruine de Bruin, a professor at the University of Southern California's Schaeffer Institute, said in an interview. "The numbers are not good."

Anthropic must now manage that deficit in public, on a quarterly cadence, with roughly $895.4 billion in committed spend tied to the very infrastructure voters just rejected at the ballot box. The success of the mid-November listing — and the valuation it ultimately commands against that $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion target — will test whether institutional investors price political risk into AI infrastructure the way local voters clearly have.