Firmus's Shadow Has Not Disappeared, Anthropic Is Coming to the Rescue? IPOs open to Australian investors, retail investors and trillion-dollar pension funds await entry

The Zhitong Finance App has learned that Anthropic PBC will sell shares directly to Australian investors in its high-profile initial public offering. According to documents submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Monday, after submitting a prospectus to the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC), Australian retail investors can participate in the offering; the exact number of shares to be issued will be disclosed in subsequent documents. Investors expect a reasonable valuation range of $1.4 trillion to $1.75 trillion, according to people familiar with the matter.

This is a deal destined to go down in history — according to multiple media accounts, Anthropic plans to raise up to $100 billion, which will surpass SpaceX's record of $86 billion in June this year and become the largest IPO in history; the company will be listed on the NASDAQ under the code ANT, and the market generally expects trading to begin in mid-November. For Australia, it means more than just “buying one hand.”

Why Australia? A market lacking AI targets

Australia has now received direct access. The background is that the local capital market has been lacking AI core assets for a long time. Compared to major tech hubs in North America and Northeast Asia, Australia doesn't have the semiconductor companies or hyperscale cloud vendors that the global stock market is focusing on this year, and local investors lack direct exposure — this gap is the reason why SpaceX's launch in Australia is being sought after this year.

SpaceX's precedent provides a quantitative reference: CommSec, the brokerage firm responsible for its Australian retail marketing, received more than 28,000 applications at the time, setting a record for the platform (the brokerage firm did not disclose the number of shares eventually placed to clients). The Australian pension industry, which is about 4.8 trillion Australian dollars (3.4 trillion US dollars), is the main target of this offering on the institutional side.

Josh Gilbert, chief analyst at eToro Asia Pacific, judged that after “the loudest name in the AI field developed behind closed doors for several years”, this release “should attract strong local interest”; compared to Firmus' highly debt-dependent expansion stories, Anthropic's numbers put it on a firmer foothold and provided something the open market had almost never before — direct exposure to cutting-edge model developers.

Shadow of Firmus: The order that just fell half a month ago

The background of this release is “The Australian market is still suffering from the collapse of a data center transaction” — Firmus Grid. The Nvidia-backed AI data center company originally planned to become Australia's largest IPO in nearly 30 years: issued at 11 Australian dollars per share, raised up to 5.5 billion US dollars, corresponding to a valuation of about 43.7 billion Australian dollars (about 34 billion US dollars), and was originally scheduled to be listed on October 23. However, demand has clearly weakened during the bookkeeping process — some potential investors are concerned about supply pressure caused by the rapid sell-off of existing shareholders after listing, and also question that its price is nearly three times higher than the August private equity financing valuation (US$10.5 billion).

According to reports, the underwriters once considered lowering it to around $8 per share. Finally, Firmus announced the withdrawal of the ASX listing application on October 9, citing “recent market fluctuations and current market conditions” and switching to private equity market financing. The company started with Bitcoin mining in 2019. Currently, the actual built capacity of about 1 gigawatt pipeline is only about 42 megawatts; the response from local institutions is lukewarm. Morningstar analysts say it has the characteristics of a “boom period,” and another fund bluntly stated that “we have difficulties with fundamental arithmetic.” Shares of its shareholder Maas Group plummeted 30% intraday on the same day.

It is this contrast that forms the core thesis of Cameron Gleeson, head of investment strategy at BetaShares: “Many Australian investors would be keen to participate in Anthropic's IPO. Anthropic and Firmus are completely different targets—Anthropic sells products that customers are already paying for and are constantly increasing their spending.”

Anthropic's ledger: “paying customers” stand up

The prospectus revealed the full financial profile of Claude's developers for the first time. Revenue for the first half of 2026 was $16.286 billion, compared to $1.16 billion in the same period last year; previously, revenue increased from $41 million in 2023 to $386 million in 2024 and $4.59 billion in 2025. Second-quarter revenue alone reached $11.56 billion and first-quarter operating profit of $974 million.

Although the overall loss was huge, it mainly came from accounting rather than cash expenses: net loss of US$80.748 billion in the first half of the year, of which approximately US$72.388 billion stemmed from changes in the fair value of financial instruments such as convertible notes as a result of rising company valuations; operating losses during the same period were only US$693 million, adjusted operating profit of US$1.62 billion, and operating cash flow was corrected to US$3.93 billion, with total cash and short-term investments of US$131.65 billion as of June 30. This is indeed structurally different from Firmus' kind of build-up stories that rely on external financing.

The customer side is also solid: as of September 30, there were more than 1,900 customers who spent more than $1 million in the past 12 months and more than 11,900 (950 each a year ago), with a net revenue retention rate of 900%. More than half of the Fortune 500 companies were customers. The cost is extremely heavy computing power bills: computing power and infrastructure spending in the first half of the year was about US$8.9 billion, and future computing power promises to be between US$518 billion and more than US$600 billion according to different statistical calibers.

Macquarie takes the lead, CommSec plays retail cards again

The underwriting team has a large lineup. According to Australian media quoting people familiar with the matter, the capital raising department of Macquarie Group (Macquarie Group) is expected to lead the Australian portion of the issuance, while CommSec, a brokerage firm owned by Commonwealth Bank of Australia, will lead retail marketing — the latter is the operator of SpaceX's retail marketing in Australia.

Note the differences in the division of labor: Macquarie is responsible for underwriting lead, and CommSec is responsible for marketing distribution to retail investors; the two are not the same. Furthermore, since S-1 has not yet provided a price range, the Australian prospectus has not yet been submitted to ASIC; based on SpaceX's experience, it will take about a week for the pricing range to be determined until the Australian documents are implemented, and local prices, quotas, and distribution arrangements are still unknown.

The regulatory framework has already been set. ASIC said it took a “pragmatic and constructive” approach to the offering, consistent with its handling of the June SpaceX IPO, but required substantial disclosure on local risks, governance differences, and investor rights. The disclosure documents obtained by Australian investors will consist of a US registration document plus an Australian-specific supplementary document. This rule is not formalism: Anthropic's governance structure is special — a Class F share jointly held by the seven founders holds 50.1% of shareholders' voting rights, the majority of board seats are elected by the trust, and a charity fund holds 5% of the non-voting shares, and the founders promise to donate 80% of the individual shares. Retail investors are buying financial benefits, not control.

The distribution also covers Japan, Canada, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and parts of Europe; Australia is one of the few markets that allow retail investors to participate directly.

Professional investors don't have to wait: two paths to participation

According to the prospectus arrangement, professional and mature investors can directly participate in Anthropic's US offering without waiting for Australian regulatory documents. Large institutional investors, such as pensions, are classified as professional investors; the legal threshold for mature investors is a net worth of at least $2.5 million, or annual income of at least $250,000.

Local brokerage firm IG Australia has pioneered the launch of a channel where traders can purchase single shares. According to its managing director Michael Jones, it was difficult for Australian retail investors to obtain quotas in large-scale US stock IPOs in the past; Anthropic transactions in the company's CFD market have increased more than 27 times since launch, and early indicative demand was even stronger than SpaceX back then. Morningstar, on the other hand, suggests a timing factor: this release falls after the US midterm elections, and the picture of the policy direction and AI sector's performance is more clear; on the contrary, it may be beneficial.

In other words, Australian institutional funding has already taken a detour — this time it's open to “ordinary people,” and this is exactly where market sentiment is most delicate: it has not only taken on SpaceX's record retail demand, but is also burdened with the psychological trauma left by Firmus's collapse.

The risks are there, too. The prospectus itself warns that rapid revenue growth “cannot be guaranteed to continue to any extent”; customer concentration is high. According to different reports, the two unnamed customers accounted for about 23% of the first half of the year's revenue, or the top five customers accounted for about 25%, and a single customer did not exceed 10%. Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group, described this as “a referendum on the entire AI deal”: if the listing soars, there will be more AI companies lining up to go public; if it fails, tech stock valuations may be quickly repriced. Lightshed's statement is more extreme — Anthropic “could become the most valuable company in the world, or eventually go bankrupt.”

For Australia, this also goes beyond finance: Anthropic has listed Australia as the only clearly named location of contracted data center capacity outside of North America in its prospectus, and has publicly lobbied to adjust local copyright rules, saying this is a prerequisite for advancing multi-billion dollar data center investments. The Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) became a strategic investor in Anthropic as early as 2025, and its annual report revealed that the holding was valued at US$1.5 billion at the end of June.