Anthropic’s $2 trillion IPO faces a new threat as Americans push back against AI data centers

Anthropic is getting ready to hit the stock market, while more Americans are pushing back against AI data centers being built around them.

People are also growing uneasy about AI, a pushback that is expected to show up as a serious risk in the company’s IPO papers.

Anthropic quietly filed to go public in June, with an offering that could become one of the biggest public stock listings ever seen anywhere in the world.

Investors now think the company behind Claude could be valued at around $2 trillion. Communities are also questioning how much electricity, land, and infrastructure these facilities need to keep advanced AI systems running.

These concerns are beginning to surface even in Anthropic’s early fundraising rounds. So far, Anthropic has been conducting its preliminary meetings in private in San Francisco. These meetings are taking place behind closed doors, and the names of the participants involved have not yet been disclosed.

Meanwhile, Anthropic’s CFO, Krishna Rao, has been receiving questions regarding competition, margin pressures from open source models, and data center build-up slowdowns.

Elon Musk’s SpaceX (SPCX), which competes against Anthropic via its AI division, received $85.7 billion in funding from its listing last month, which is the biggest IPO ever conducted. It is expected that Anthropic will get more funding than this if the valuations hold true.

Anthropic needs more computing power while Americans keep pushing back against new AI data centers

Anthropic needs much more computing power to meet demand for Claude and newer AI products. Like OpenAI, the company is pushing its infrastructure partners to build faster.

Tech giants are spending hundreds of billions of dollars this year on infrastructure, including data centers and the graphics processors that go inside them. Those sites train advanced models and run new AI services at scale.

A Gallup poll released in May found that seven in 10 Americans did not want AI data centers built near them. Almost half said they were “strongly opposed.”

Only around one-quarter supported local projects. Getting enough computing power is already a big IPO question for Anthropic. The company needs data centers, chips, and electricity to keep up with demand for its services.

Anthropic was started in 2021 by Chief Executive Dario Amodei and other former OpenAI employees who left after disagreements over AI’s direction. For years, the startup was seen as behind OpenAI.

Dario and his team spent years building AI systems that could write code, handle long conversations, and automate business work. Then Claude Code gained ground. As the coding product improved, Anthropic’s revenue climbed quickly.

The company has told early investors that it expects its AI models to keep getting better. Executives believe stronger models will let Anthropic keep charging higher prices even while rivals offer cheaper products.

Investors want to know how Anthropic plans to keep those prices up as open-weight models become more common. Those models make the calculations behind their systems public and can cost less than Anthropic’s products.

Anthropic brings fast revenue growth to investors as they weigh a possible $2 trillion valuation

Anthropic’s investors believe the market for its AI services could eventually be worth several trillion dollars. They expect AI to move into huge parts of white-collar work. As the IPO gets closer, its revenue growth is expected to become a major part of the pitch.

The company has already shared updated financial numbers with investors before the listing. Last month, Anthropic moved above $65 billion in annualized revenue.

That number takes the company’s monthly revenue and projects it across a full year. At the end of last year, the same figure was $9 billion. Anthropic also made $11.6 billion in revenue during the second quarter.

Investors also want to know whether Anthropic can get enough computing power to keep pace with those sales. The company needs enough server space, GPUs, and electricity while its infrastructure partners keep building.

Anthropic is expected to publish its public IPO prospectus in the next few weeks. Its shares are then expected to start trading in the months after that.