Anthropic plans to debut on Nasdaq in mid-November with a valuation of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, down from an earlier $2 trillion target. The AI company faces headwinds after this week's midterm elections, where voters rejected data center development in 40 of 41 ballot measures and elected candidates supporting stricter AI regulation in Michigan, Ohio, Texas, and Georgia. More than half of voters said AI data centers were a "crucial" or "major factor" in their congressional voting choice, according to an NBC News exit poll.
Anthropic disclosed in its IPO prospectus that it has committed to spending about $895.4 billion on compute and infrastructure through purchase commitments and lease agreements. The Nasdaq dropped steeply on Thursday and posted its worst October since March 2025, with chipmakers and cloud companies hit hardest.
The company's focus on going public at a high valuation conflicts with public sentiment. "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."
Anthropic acknowledged in its prospectus that opposition to data center development has grown more organized across jurisdictions and that its higher public profile could draw added scrutiny to projects linked to it. A University of Southern California survey found that 71% of respondents do not trust big tech companies to act in society's best interest "at all" around data center development.