AMD Commits $2.5 Billion to Anthropic's IPO Private Placement

AMD has committed $2.5 billion to Anthropic's private placement, according to the AI developer's amended IPO filing. The filing allocates AMD 33,783,783 shares at the $74 midpoint of the marketed range, the third-largest slice of the placement behind Google and Nvidia. The Motley Fool describes the stake as non-voting Class N common stock that counts toward AMD's earlier commitment of up to $5 billion, which was tied to chip deliveries.

The placement is part of one of the largest listings on record. Anthropic is marketing 825 million shares at $70 to $78 under the ticker ANT and is seeking as much as $90.4 billion through the IPO and the private placement combined, with trading expected to begin next Thursday. For AMD the check is financially modest, roughly 0.3% of its market value, and about a third of the $7.4 billion in cash and equivalents it held at the end of the third quarter. The strategic point is that Anthropic says it runs workloads across AWS Trainium, Google TPUs, Nvidia GPUs and AMD GPUs, so the stake buys AMD a closer seat with one of the largest buyers of AI compute.

The shares have responded. AMD closed up 1.30% at $515.21 on November 10 while the S&P 500 fell 0.38% and the Nasdaq slipped 0.74%, rose 1.72% to $524.07 early on November 11 after Goldman Sachs named it among its top semiconductor picks, and was up 9.0% at $561.68 by 1:17 p.m. ET, per SentiSense market data. The backdrop is a strong print: third-quarter revenue reached a record $13.4 billion, up from $11.5 billion in the second quarter.

What to watch: where Anthropic prices the deal relative to the $70 to $78 range, since AMD's placement shares buy in at the IPO price, and whether the relationship shows up as Instinct GPU orders. Goldman's James Schneider called AMD very attractive on growth but less compelling on valuation, so the stake's payoff likely depends on share of Anthropic's compute spend rather than the equity itself.