In May 2012, Mark Zuckerberg didn’t fly to New York to ring the Nasdaq bell, nah, couldn’t be bothered for that. Instead, he rang it from Facebook’s own headquarters in California.

Quite the flex, I think.

At the time, shares were priced at $38, raising about $16 billion and valuing Facebook at $104 billion. It was the proverbial Mega IPO of its day.

Interestingly by early September that year, the shares closed at $17.73, down 53%. Keep that in mind for later…

The people at Facebook did incredibly well from that IPO. Before the float, the estimate was it had created 500 to 1,000 new millionaires among the staff.

That money, and the people holding it, went on to build a lot more.

Crunchbase now counts 1,059 companies founded by Meta alumni, with $239.6 billion raised between them. And that’s arguably the real story from gigantic IPOs. Not just what happens at the time, but the secondary effects it creates and the number of startups and value it creates in the years after.

We’re about to see that again, on an even more gigantic scale.

Anthropic filed its S-1 with the SEC on Monday, and plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, possibly as soon as November 19 or 20.

That means you’ve got about three weeks to figure out if you want to buy the IPO or not.

Today, I’m going to help with that.

The numbers are wild, with revenue of $16.3 billion for the first half of 2026, compared to $1.2 billion a year earlier.

It posted an $80.7 billion net loss, but $72.4 billion of that is a paper charge on convertible notes. Strip that out, and it made an adjusted operating profit of $1.6 billion.

Revenue grew 1,368% in the June quarter, while compute and infrastructure costs grew 300%.

Also, and this might be the most important number of them all, for every $1 spent on compute in the first half, it took in $1.82 of revenue, compared to $0.50 a year earlier.

Looks enticing. So, should you buy it?

My view is probably not at the IPO. For all the build up and hype in recent times around these mega AI IPOs, none of them have immediately kicked higher.

Its valuation is at a big multiple, which anticipates it growing equally as fast into that number. I think it heads lower before it heads higher. Maybe even Facebook style, down 50% in the months after, and that makes it worth a buy.

It’s also worth considering what else this means. Like Facebook, a lot of Anthropic people will be making generational wealth. Many will use that to create new companies that will come to market in the coming years.

Keep an eye out for Anthropic alumni and what they build next.

But also look at those compute numbers. Anthropic needs ever more chips, power and buildings, estimates are it’s signed up for around $1 trillion of all that through to 2045.

Some of those deals run for 20 years. Anthropic pays whether it uses the capacity or not, the price rises every year, and someone is collecting on those invoices.

They’ve been smashed recently, but I keep coming back to the compute companies.

Nearly half of the contracted capacity at TeraWulf (Nasdaq: WULF) is leased to Anthropic.

About a quarter of the AI leases at Hut 8 (Nasdaq: HUT) are with Anthropic too. Nscale relies on it for 43% of $103 billion in contracts.

They’re not the only ones, but these companies can’t live without Anthropic and Anthropic can’t live without them.

Of course, a 20-year contract is only as good as the company paying it. But on those IPO numbers, Anthropic is good for it.

The way I see it, this is Facebook all over again, just around 15x bigger.

The IPO grabs the headlines, but the money spills out to the companies around it and the people inside it.

If the market stamps a $1.5 trillion price on Anthropic, it’s hard to keep pricing its landlords like it’s all about to capitulate.

So, wait on Anthropic, wait for some price sanity to hit the market. And the beaten down neoclouds and compute providers might be worth a slither of your risk capital.

Either way, this is another Mega IPO to add to the history books for 2026!

More soon,

Lewis Maguire