As the IPO of large AI model developer Anthropic is around the corner, capital is generating huge wealth while hidden bubble risks are looming.
The history of Silicon Valley has never been short of wealth creation myths. From the birth of Apple to the rise of Google, venture capitalists (VCs) bet millions of dollars on future giants and eventually reaped returns a hundredfold or thousandfold.
However, as the wheel of history rolls into the era of AI large models, this classical venture capital narrative of “getting big returns with small stakes” is being devoured by an extremely violent, even suffocating, capital behemoth.
As the IPO process of large model giant Anthropic enters the countdown, Bloomberg has exhaustively sorted out the list of shareholders behind this company. This list is hailed as one of the most exaggerated wealth creation events in Silicon Valley history. It not only demonstrates the staggering wealth expansion speed in the AI era, but also completely tears apart the intricate, even somewhat magical, giant capital web behind the large model arms race.
Staggering Return on Investment: Excessive Profits Across Cycles
The first thing that makes people dizzy is the book gains of those early entrants.
In 2023, venture capital firm Spark Capital made the largest bet in its history: investing 75 million dollars in Anthropic, which was newly established and had almost no revenue at that time. Three years later, according to the latest private market valuation, the shares held by Spark Capital have soared to about 7 billion dollars. With a return rate close to 100 times, this 75 million dollar investment has become one of the greatest “home runs” in the history of venture capital. More importantly, Spark Capital is also the only known venture capital firm with a seat on Anthropic’s board of directors, which provides it with unparalleled information advantages and decision-making discourse power.
Menlo Ventures also made an equally precise bet. It started to contact Anthropic back in 2023, when the latter was still struggling to catch up with OpenAI and barely had any income; when leading the Series D round in 2024, Menlo Ventures placed a huge bet of 750 million dollars, with total investment exceeding 1 billion dollars. Today, the value of this stake is about 14 billion dollars.
Even Sound Ventures, co-founded by Hollywood star Ashton Kutcher, got a piece of the pie. It invested 35 million dollars in 2023 when Anthropic was valued at only 5 billion dollars, and then kept increasing its investment to 400 million dollars. Today, the value of this asset has swelled to billions of dollars.
In the AI era, the speed of cashing out cognitive advantages has surpassed any period in human commercial history. A bet that seemed crazy in 2023 has turned into the most brilliant record in the institution’s history three years later.
Mutation of the Capital Game: From “Unicorn Building” to “Trillion-Dollar Behemoth”
What is truly shocking is not the sudden wealth of early investors, but the fact that late entrants can still make huge profits.
The most notable name on this shareholder list is Iconiq. This institution did not make its first investment in Anthropic until 2025, when the latter’s valuation had reached an extremely staggering 183 billion dollars — which used to be an astronomical number in the traditional venture capital circle, usually regarded as the “ceiling” of a company’s value.
However, in the AI track, the so-called ceiling is just the floor. Iconiq has invested a total of more than 6 billion dollars. According to the latest private valuation of 965 billion dollars, the value of its shareholding is about 17 billion dollars. If Anthropic’s IPO hits 2 trillion dollars as the market expects, Iconiq’s investment will double again and become the largest single return in its history.
HSG, which also “bought in at a high level” and still made huge profits, is another case in point. As a top-tier venture capital firm that has invested in OpenAI, HSG did not invest 3 billion dollars to acquire about 1% of Anthropic’s shares until the beginning of this year. Today, the value of this equity is nearly 10 billion dollars. Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund GIC has followed a similar path, with cumulative investment exceeding 4.5 billion dollars to obtain about 1% of the shares. In August this year, Anthropic also established a strategic cooperation with GIC and Macquarie Asset Management to jointly build data centers, upgrading financial investment to deep industrial integration.
This reveals an extremely harsh reality: artificial intelligence has turned venture capital into a capital arms race that only a handful of top players can participate in. The old venture capital legend was turning millions of dollars into a unicorn valued at one billion dollars; the new rule of the game is that you have to raise tens of billions of dollars first, and then bet on whether it can become the next trillion-dollar company. Missing the early entry window does not mean being out of the game; but if you are not ready with a checkbook of tens of billions of dollars, you don’t even qualify to sit at the table.
Silicon Valley’s “Circular Alchemy”: Acting as Both Supplier and Rent Collector
Apart from VCs, behind Anthropic stand the most powerful giants in today’s tech industry: Google, Amazon and NVIDIA.
Their roles in this shareholder list are extremely complex and thought-provoking. They are not only key infrastructure suppliers for Anthropic, providing expensive chips and cloud computing power, but also the largest equity investors of the company.
This is an extremely sophisticated “Circular Financing” model.
Take Amazon and Google as examples. They inject huge amounts of cash into Anthropic through investment — Amazon pledged to invest up to 33 billion dollars, and Google pledged up to 40 billion dollars; Anthropic immediately uses this money to buy Amazon’s AWS services or Google’s cloud computing power, promising to purchase more than 1000 billion dollars of cloud services from AWS and lock in 2000 billion dollars of computing power from Google Cloud in the next ten years. In this process, the giants not only make part of the money by “selling computing power”, but also earn extremely terrifying premiums on their equity investments by continuously driving up Anthropic’s valuation.
NVIDIA is the ultimate embodiment of this logic. It has sold a large number of GPUs and earned the most staggering hardware profit in the history of human industry, while pledging to invest up to 10 billion dollars in Anthropic, deeply binding the most core downstream customer. This closed capital loop that “keeps all benefits within the circle” deeply ties large model companies, cloud vendors and chip makers to an irreversible warship of shared interests. As long as the AI bubble does not burst, they are the permanent winners. As some analysts put it, this shareholder list clearly shows the capital cycle of the entire artificial intelligence industry — money flows from chips to the cloud, then turns into equity, and finally circles back to the starting point.
Traces of the Era: Cross-border Carnival from SBF to Schmidt
Several highly dramatic names are mixed in this extremely formal and dazzling shareholder list.
The most sigh-worthy name is Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of FTX. His name is prominently on the list of Series B investors of Anthropic. In 2022, this cryptocurrency madman who later ended up in prison for a massive fraud case led Anthropic’s Series B round through Alameda Research, investing 500 million dollars to obtain about 8% of the equity when the company was valued at only 2.5 billion dollars. After the collapse of FTX, this equity was sold by the bankruptcy liquidator for about 1.3 billion dollars in 2024. If FTX had not collapsed, this investment would have become his ultimate last straw to make a comeback, but now it can only become a highly coveted asset in the bankruptcy liquidation process.
Another interesting investor is Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google. He invested tens of millions of dollars back in the Series A round in 2021, holding about 1% of Anthropic’s shares through platforms such as his family office Hillspire, TomorrowVentures and Innovation Endeavors, which will soon make him one of the individual investors with the highest returns. The old man who once steered the previous generation of tech giants used his private funds to grab the ticket for the next generation of tech overlord.
Conclusion: The Ultimate Realization of Paper Wealth and the Critical Point of the Bubble
According to Bloomberg reports, this IPO will not only make the 7 billionaire co-founders of Anthropic even richer, but also likely directly create thousands of millionaire employees, completely reshaping the wealth map of tech talents in the San Francisco Bay Area and even across the globe.
The most thought-provoking point is that while the whole market is still fiercely debating “whether AI is a huge bubble”, those top institutions actually sitting at the card table are already preparing to embrace this unprecedented book return. For early capital, it no longer matters whether it is a bubble or not. As long as the IPO rings the bell smoothly, they have completed the thrilling leap from “paper wealth” to “real tangible wealth”.
Anthropic plans to push forward its IPO in the coming weeks, and the market is even abuzz with discussions that its valuation may reach as high as 2 trillion dollars. If this comes true, the return records created by Silicon Valley VCs over the past decades will be completely rewritten.
However, the price of this wealth creation myth is the increasingly high threshold, increasingly concentrated capital, and increasingly disturbing circular financing structure. When these venture capitalists cash out and leave the secondary market, what they leave for public market investors will be a trillion-dollar behemoth that needs to pay massive computing power bills, faces extremely fierce price wars, and has not yet fully proven its profitability. In the 2025 fiscal year, Anthropic’s revenue was about 4.6 billion dollars, but its computing power and infrastructure expenditure reached as high as 7.3 billion dollars, with operating losses expanding from 2.98 billion dollars in 2024 to 8.06 billion dollars — the computing power cost has reached 1.6 times of its revenue.
Silicon Valley’s wealth creation machine is still roaring, but this time, ordinary people who stay at the card table may only end up as onlookers who foot the final bill for this grand capital feast.
This article is from the WeChat official account “Tech Business” and authorized for release by 36Kr
