Anthropic Carves Out Up to $3.5 Billion of Its IPO for Japanese Investors — More Than SpaceX Sold Them in Its $75 Billion Listing

Anthropic plans to sell up to 552.9 billion yen — roughly $3.5 billion — of shares to investors in Japan through its US initial public offering, according to a filing submitted Monday and reported by Reuters and Bloomberg. The Japan-specific allocation makes the country one of only a handful of markets, alongside Australia, Canada and parts of Europe, where investors get direct access to the listing.

Mizuho Securities will manage the Japanese portion of the offering, with Goldman Sachs, Mitsubishi UFJ Morgan Stanley Securities and Morgan Stanley MUFG Securities among the banks handling investor orders; Mizuho Financial Group and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group also sit in the underwriting syndicate. The shares on offer in Japan are new stock, and the proceeds are earmarked for working capital, operating expenses and capital expenditure rather than sales by existing holders.

The scale is notable against recent precedent. When SpaceX went public in June, raising $75 billion in the largest IPO of the year, Japanese investors ultimately secured about $2.2 billion of shares. If Anthropic's Japan tranche reaches its stated ceiling, it would hand Tokyo investors a bigger allocation than they got from that entire listing. Bloomberg notes Japanese IPO activity has fallen to a 14-year low, which makes a US mega-listing courting Japanese demand all the more pointed.

What the filing still does not say is almost everything else: the overall size of the IPO, the final share count and the valuation all remain undisclosed. Anthropic filed its S-1 with the SEC on October 26, and Reuters has previously reported that some investors have discussed a valuation of around $1.5 trillion, which would make it one of the largest tech listings ever. Pricing will be negotiated between the company, selling shareholders and the underwriters' representatives.

The overseas carve-out also says something about demand dynamics. Anthropic is going public into a market that has spent two weeks repricing AI infrastructure names, and its own prospectus shows hundreds of billions of dollars in future compute and infrastructure commitments. Spreading the offering across Japanese, Australian, Canadian and European channels widens the pool of buyers beyond a stretched US institutional base — and for Japanese institutions, still hungry for US tech exposure after SpaceX, a direct allocation in the year's most watched AI listing is exactly the kind of paper they have been asking for.