Anthropic, the company behind Claude AI, is positioned to become the biggest IPO in stock market history following its filing to go public in the US after its last funding round was valued at $965 billion. According to reports, the company's prospectus revealed significant financial metrics, with revenue increasing 12x to nearly $4.6 billion by the end of 2025, though net loss also increased to $42 billion. The company is committing $518 billion to computing infrastructure over the next decade, with a quarter of its revenue coming from only two unnamed customers. Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Citi are working on the deal, with a target valuation around $2 trillion that would overtake SpaceX's $1.77 trillion June debut as the largest IPO in history. Recent developments show Broadcom agreed to lend up to $42 billion for Anthropic's compute infrastructure, with the ceiling exceeding Broadcom's cash balance, linking potential customer growth to a significant capital commitment.
Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, believes software stocks under pressure may be at a turning point following the Anthropic event and other AI developments. Speaking to CNBC on Friday, Ives stated that "software is going to start to bottom here, especially after the Anthropic event, Salesforce, ServiceNow and others." He identified the winners in the AI infrastructure space as Nvidia, AMD, and Micron on the chip side, and Microsoft, Amazon, and others on the hyperscaler side. Ives characterized the current period as an "AI ghost narrative where good is bad and bad is worse," but emphasized that the outcome would depend on "where the spending is on the enterprise and the AI," which he said would dictate stock movement over the next 12-24 months.
Nvidia is positioned as the AI bellwether, with the stock hitting an intraday record of about $237.83 on October 2 and closing at $233.95, up roughly 25% in 2026. According to reports, fiscal third-quarter earnings are expected on November 17, with Nvidia guiding for about $108 billion in revenue. Wall Street remains heavily bullish, with every tracked analyst rating Nvidia a Buy and price targets ranging from $275 to $400. Bernstein has the highest target at $400, followed by Rosenblatt at $390, while even Barclays, the most cautious of the tracked bulls, has a $275 target, implying further upside from current levels. However, recent developments show Nvidia's $19.7B in quarterly buybacks absorbed roughly 92% of its $21.3B free cash flow, leaving little cash generation after repurchases. With another $150B authorized and $235B available, the company can expand its buyback program, though heavier buying would leave less for other uses unless cash generation grows alongside it.
Morgan Stanley expects power shortages to affect parts of the AI chip ecosystem unevenly, with memory, optical, power-management and analog suppliers facing greater inventory risks if data-centre deployments are delayed or customer orders are pushed back. The brokerage estimates that US data-centre developers face a 34% net power shortfall through 2028, equivalent to around 32 gigawatts, even after accounting for alternatives such as behind-the-meter generation and fuel cells. For Nvidia and Broadcom, Morgan Stanley sees relatively limited exposure to the bottleneck, pointing to the companies' visibility into chip deployment, geographic expansion plans and coordination among data-centre operators, semiconductor suppliers and power providers. However, a slower pace of data-centre deployment could create problems further down the chip supply chain, with memory chips, optical components, power-management products and analog semiconductors among the most vulnerable segments.
BNP Paribas has retained its Outperform rating on Nvidia and raised its target price to $345 from $285, implying 47% upside from the stock's October 2 price of $234. The brokerage sees Nvidia's full-stack AI platform, including GPUs, networking and software, helping it navigate the shift towards increasingly complex inference workloads and sustain its market leadership. As reported by The Economic Times, BNP Paribas believes Nvidia's advantage is becoming more relevant as AI moves beyond training and towards increasingly complex inference workloads. The brokerage noted that Nvidia faces growing competition in AI chips, but believes its full-stack platform remains a key advantage that rivals will struggle to replicate.
Micron Technology has emerged as the AI memory leader, with shares up roughly 277% in 2026, making it one of the year's strongest AI trades. As reported, fiscal Q4 revenue reached a record $54.23 billion, while DRAM revenue jumped 343% to $39.8 billion. The company is the only US-based producer of high-bandwidth memory (HBM), a critical component used in AI accelerators. Recent developments show Micron's Q4 revenue surged a record 379% YoY to $54.2B, while Q1 guidance of $60-63B crushed the $56.6B consensus, confirming AI memory demand isn't going anywhere. Wall Street has become increasingly bullish, with D.A. Davidson raising its target to $2,100, Rosenblatt moving to $1,900, and Barclays maintaining a $2,000 target, while Goldman Sachs remains more cautious with a $1,250 target. The company's latest earnings blowout with sales growing 37.1% to $54.23 billion and earnings surging 161.5% to $37.7 billion has reinforced its monopoly position in the AI memory market.
