Yesterday’s bruising market sell-off sent tech stocks plunging on questions about what the newly elected Democratic majority in Congress means for the data center build-out and AI.
The pain was so acute it’s bled into Anthropic’s (ANTH.PVT) upcoming IPO. According to Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, investors are now eyeing a potential market valuation of between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion for the AI startup.
That’s far below the $2 trillion buyers were projecting just last month when stocks were flying high.
Anthropic, which publicly filed its S-1 investor prospectus last Monday and updated it this week with more recent revenue and spending numbers, is widely expected to launch its IPO sometime before the end of the month.
But that could slip to a later date due to the broader market sell-off.
Odds that the AI lab goes public before Dec. 1 have plummeted on prediction markets Polymarket and Kalshi, dropping from roughly 80% to near 50%.
Tuesday’s election results are seen as a broad repudiation of the AI movement and data center construction across the country, as voters registered anxieties about potential job displacement and the impact of data centers on local communities.
That has raised concerns about the nationwide data center build-out, which became a flashpoint in the lead-up to the election, with President Trump widely supporting the effort.
Democrats, and some Republicans, however, seized on backlash against data centers and AI more broadly, driving concerns that projects could be canceled or otherwise hindered.
Meta (META) president Dina Powell McCormick told an audience at the Wall Street Journal’s WSJ Tech event on Wednesday that building data centers will be harder following the election results.
On Thursday, OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) outlined its latest policy proposals for data centers it owns and operates, including ending non-disclosure agreements with towns and paying the full cost of the electricity it uses and the infrastructure needed to serve the company’s facilities.
The Anthropic rival was initially expected to go public by the end of the year, but pushed that out to early 2027.
And while that was originally seen as a potential sign of weakness for OpenAI’s public debut, given the current market volatility, it may end up working in the company’s favor.
Email Daniel Howley at dhowley@yahoofinance.com. Follow him on X at @DanielHowley or reach out on Signal or Telegram.
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