Key Takeaways
- On Friday, Bloomberg reported that buyers in Anthropic’s IPO see a valuation as low as $1.1 trillion. As recently as Thursday, Wall Street expected $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion.
- Andrew Ross Sorkin calls the IPO “the linchpin” because Amazon, Alphabet and Microsoft all own Anthropic stakes that are built into their own valuations.
- Amazon has the most at stake: it has invested $18 billion in Anthropic and carried the position at about $239 billion on Sept. 30.
- Even $1.1 trillion would top Anthropic’s last private round, so the bigger risk for all three is an IPO that gets delayed or falls on its first day.
Anthropic hasn’t set its IPO price yet, and the number keeps getting smaller.
As recently as Thursday, Wall Street expected the AI lab to list at $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion. On Friday, Bloomberg reported that IPO buyers now see a valuation as low as $1.1 trillion.
That matters a lot for Amazon (AMZN), Alphabet (GOOG) and Microsoft (MSFT), which all own pieces of Anthropic. On Friday’s Squawk Pod, CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin was asked whether some of the biggest funds had been forced to sell in Thursday’s tech rout. His answer:
“I’m more concerned about this Anthropic IPO as sort of the linchpin because baked into the cake of the valuations of Amazon, of Google, of Microsoft, all of them have stakes in Anthropic.”
He’s right that all three have real money on the line. But they don’t all have the same amount riding on the price.
TIKR tracks 61 analysts on Amazon. How many say “Buy”?
See the full breakdown of Buy, Hold, and Sell ratings on Amazon, along with Wall Street’s revenue and earnings estimates, all in one place. More than 500,000 investors use TIKR to research stocks like this one. See Amazon’s Analyst Ratings
$1.1 trillion still clears the last round
CNBC’s Kate Rooney has been talking to investors in the deal. On Closing Bell, she said the biggest thing they want to see “is that the company can get above that last private valuation, which was just under a trillion dollars.” Even the low end of Bloomberg’s range does that.
Alphabet’s stake cost it far less than that. Its earlier investments are worth roughly $3 billion, and in April it laid out plans to invest $40 billion more if Anthropic hits certain performance goals. Alphabet doesn’t break out what the stake is worth, and it doesn’t need to, since its own earnings carry the stock. Analysts expect Alphabet’s normalized EPS to rise from $10.81 in 2025 to $18.13 in 2028:
I don’t see anything in Anthropic’s IPO price that should move those estimates.
Amazon has the most riding on it
Amazon is a different story. It has invested $18 billion in Anthropic. As of Sept. 30, its latest quarterly filing carried $92.5 billion of Anthropic preferred stock plus $146.2 billion of notes that convert to stock at the IPO, so about $239 billion in all. Amazon books changes in that value as income. Upward marks on the stake added $62.8 billion of pre-tax income in the first half of 2026, more than the $51.3 billion of operating income Amazon earned in those six months.
Investors aren’t paying up for Amazon’s own business, though. Amazon trades at 25x forward earnings, well below its three-year average of 35x and close to the 23x low it hit on Oct. 30:
So a cheaper Anthropic would land mostly on Amazon’s reported profit. Once Anthropic trades, I’d expect that profit to swing with its share price, up or down.
Microsoft’s bigger worry is OpenAI
Microsoft’s Anthropic stake is the newest of the three. Last November, Microsoft agreed to invest $5 billion, and Anthropic committed to spend $30 billion on Azure. In its quarter ended June 30, Microsoft booked a $3.2 billion gain on the stake, which added $0.33 to diluted EPS. Sorkin also tied the IPO to OpenAI, which he said all three back as well: “if you don’t get the Anthropic IPO off at whatever valuation you think, therefore the valuation of OpenAI is not the same all of a sudden.”
Microsoft’s multiple has already come down too. It trades at 26x forward earnings, below its three-year average of 30x but well above the 19x low it hit on June 25:
Anthropic needs a clean first day
HSBC’s Max Kettner, speaking on Bloomberg Surveillance, called the IPO the biggest near-term event risk heading into year-end. He warned Anthropic against squeezing every dollar out of the price, because then the worst case is that “the stock dumps 20, 30 percent on day one.” Anthropic doesn’t have much room for that: a 20% drop from $1.1 trillion would leave it at $880 billion, below its last private round. On top of that, the odds on Kalshi that Anthropic announces its IPO before December fell from nearly 90% to 57% over the past week.
Bottom line: a $1.1 trillion Anthropic is still a big win on paper for all three companies, and for Amazon most of all. What would hurt is a delay, or a first-day drop below that last round. So I’d rather see Anthropic price low and hold up.
Of course, nothing is priced yet. The price range was still blank in Anthropic’s Nov. 2 amended filing, and we’ll know within weeks whether $1.1 trillion turns out to be a floor or a ceiling.
So what is Amazon stock actually worth?
TIKR lets you forecast the future price of any stock in less than a minute. Just enter a few assumptions into TIKR’s valuation model and see what Amazon could be worth. Start from Wall Street consensus estimates, or adjust the inputs to reflect your own view of the business. It’s free to use.
Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
