Anthropic’s blockbuster IPO just got harder after Jensen Huang’s dramatic exit as Nvidia CEO

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The AI company is set to list days after Nvidia lost the CEO who sold the AI boom to Wall Street. Investors say Anthropic’s business is intact, but the broader AI story is under new strain.

Anthropic is about to embark on one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in history. After a dramatic turn of events, it will now be doing so a week after the industry lost one of its most powerful figures and best salesmen.

Nvidia’s longtime CEO and co-founder Jensen Huang resigned from the company on Thursday following reports alleging he had engaged in two extramarital affairs: one with a customer suspected by U.S. intelligence to be a Chinese intelligence asset and another with an Nvidia executive who reports to him.

The timing has thrown new pressure on Anthropic’s listing, which was already seen as a stress test for investors’ appetite for AI. The AI lab is expected to list on Wednesday or Thursday next week, days after Nvidia reports quarterly earnings—the company’s first-ever without Huang at the helm.

Nvidia is a close partner of Anthropic and intimately involved in the lab’s upcoming IPO. According to Anthropic’s filings, the chipmaker has agreed to buy about $10 billion of shares in a $26 billion private placement alongside the IPO. The two companies are also closely tied commercially, with Anthropic committing to tens of billions of dollars to secure access to Nvidia’s most advanced chips.

Investors and analysts told Fortune that while they don’t expect the Nvidia shock to affect Anthropic’s core business, it could cause problems for the broader AI story.

Jay Goldberg, an analyst at Seaport Research Partners and one of the few on Wall Street with a sell rating on Nvidia’s stock, doesn’t expect Huang’s exit to derail the deal. “They’re going to go public right in the face of Nvidia’s earnings call, and I don’t think that derails it,” he said. “It’s such a massive IPO and there’s so many people behind it now that they don’t pull the IPO.”

The bigger risk, he said, comes once Anthropic is a public company. Speaking shortly before Huang’s departure but after reports that he was likely to be leaving the company, Goldberg warned that turmoil at Nvidia, including the…

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