Anthropic wants a $1.4 trillion IPO

What happened: Anthropic's amended prospectus proposes selling 825 million shares at $70 to $78 each, though the offering remains subject to completion.

• Some shares come from selling stockholders, and TechCrunch says the price range implies a valuation of about $1.404 trillion.
• The company reports about $900.9 billion in committed spending, nearly all for compute and infrastructure.
• About $70.7 billion falls due within the next 12 months, and much of the rest runs through 2045.

Why it matters: Frontier labs are locking in multi-year compute contracts sized in the hundreds of billions. If you buy capacity from the same providers, watch how those obligations shape pricing and who gets allocation first.

What happened: Thinking Machines Lab made the open weights for Inkling 2 Small available on November 12, one week after its closed-weight debut on Tinker.

• The Apache 2.0 license allows commercial use, modification and redistribution, and the model is a sparse mixture-of-experts design with 594 billion total parameters, 17 billion active per token.
• On the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index it scores 31, up from 13 for Inkling Small, which the lab says puts it roughly level with Gemini 3.8 Flash.
• It placed fourth overall and first among open-weight models on DesignArena with an Elo of 1,376, but the main checkpoint needs at least 500GB of VRAM, such as two B300 or four H200 GPUs.

Why it matters: A permissive license means you can build it into a product you sell and change it to fit your needs. The hardware bar is high, so treat it as a serious option for teams with the infrastructure, not a cheap default.

What happened: A Wall Street Journal profile of interim CEO Colette Kress says Nvidia financed customers to keep demand for its chips strong.

• Nvidia reportedly pushed for more such arrangements in mid-to-late 2026 to absorb an oversupply of TSMC wafers and support GPU prices.
• The largest case involved an OpenAI data center in Ohio expected to use about $300 billion of Nvidia hardware, where a $250 billion guarantee was considered and then roughly halved in an agreement signed August 17. Reuters cites $120 billion.
• Nvidia shares fell 5% after the July 26 report on the guarantee plan, and Nvidia has since paused some financing and added board-level reviews. No Nvidia statement or filing confirms a deliberate scarcity strategy.

Why it matters: When a chip supplier also funds its buyers, demand can look stronger than it is, and borrowers carry that risk. If your cloud provider is also a funder, ask what happens to your pricing if that support is pulled back.