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Data centres rebuked

Credited to Financial Times$ · ft.com22h ago

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Power & Sites · United States

Anthropic IPO meets AI backlash after midterms show stinging rebuke of data centers

Credited to CNBC · cnbc.com · 19h ago

Americans were unequivocal at the ballot box this week as they expressed disdain for tech billionaires and mistrust of artificial intelligence. With that backdrop, Anthropic is about to try to go public.

The AI company is gearing up for a potentially historic IPO, likely targeting mid-November for its Nasdaq debut. CNBC reported on Friday that Anthropic investors see the company aiming for a valuation of $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion, down from a target of $2 trillion that had been floated in recent months.

From Wall Street to Main Street, it's becoming a tougher environment for Anthropic. The Nasdaq on Thursday suffered its steepest drop in 19 months, and it's down to start November after October marked its worst month since March 2025. Chipmakers and neoclouds, the companies most closely tied to the AI buildout, are getting hit the hardest.

Voters rebuked AI in Tuesday's midterm elections, while sending Democrats to sweeping congressional victories across the country. Candidates who advocated for more stringent AI regulation won handily in states like Michigan, Ohio, Texas and Georgia, which will all now have Democratic governors, and local communities opposed data center-related ballot measures in 40 out of 41 cases.

More than half of voters said AI data centers were a "crucial" or "major factor" in who they supported for Congress, according to an exit poll from NBC News.

"People don't want a data center going near them if it's just going to house AI that's going to help a big tech company profit," Maura Austin, a behavioral scientist at the University of Virginia, told CNBC. "What Anthropic is doing when they're going public with such a high valuation is they're really leaning into that big tech, billionaire kind of caricature. I expect that's not going to go well with the public."

Anthropic has long tried to position itself as a safety-conscious company that takes AI's potential risks and benefits seriously. CEO Dario Amodei co-founded the company alongside a handful of researchers who defected from OpenAI, now its chief rival. Anthropic is best known for developing a family of AI models called Claude, and it primarily sells its products and services to other businesses.

The company's enterprise focus has helped it avoid becoming the public face of AI, leaving that distinction to OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman. But with Anthropic poised to become the first pure-play AI company to hit the public market, minting a number of new billionaires and many more millionaires in the process, a heightened level of scrutiny is coming.

"Being a public company, just that by itself pushes you in the limelight," Reena Aggarwal, a professor of finance at Georgetown University, said in an interview. "And then AI is such a hot-button issue that Anthropic will be in the limelight even more."

Matt Kennedy, a senior IPO market strategist at Renaissance Capital, said that's not necessarily a bad thing for Anthropic.

Public markets force greater transparency, he said, and the company could attract new users through its debut. And since AI has become such a mainstream conversation topic, several private companies are already household names.

"I would say that a public company does not deserve more criticisms than a comparable private company," Kennedy said. "So Anthropic should not be put in a harsher public spotlight than OpenAI just because it's public."

Data center blowback

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei looks on as US Speaker of the House Mike Johnson speaks to the press after a meeting with technology executives about artificial intelligence at the White House in Washington, DC, on Sept. 29, 2026.

AI backlash accelerated over the summer after a series of high-profile safety and security incidents rattled the public. As concerns mounted, the debate over data centers intensified, while tech's hyperscalers simultaneously boosted their forecasts for capital expenditures, each reaching into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Anthropic and OpenAI depend on state-of-the-art data centers to train models and serve customers, and they're trying to build out capacity as quickly as possible to meet demand. Anthropic said in an amended IPO prospectus this week that it has entered into purchase commitments and lease agreements with an aggregate committed spend of about $895.4 billion, "substantially all of which is related to compute and infrastructure."

Americans grappling with inflation and stubbornly high gas prices have grown worried that the facilities could exacerbate environmental harms, raise utility bills and contribute to job loss. For many, a proposed data center in their backyard became the physical manifestation of the widespread antipathy toward AI.

In the risk factors section of its prospectus, Anthropic said opposition to data center development has become more organized across jurisdictions, and that the company's public profile could draw particular scrutiny to projects associated with it.

Nicole Greene, an analyst at Gartner, said she expects that Anthropic's executives have long been prepared to contend with AI backlash, especially given the disruptive nature of the technology.

"There's going to be big emotions," Greene told CNBC. "With big emotions and feelings — fear and excitement — comes heightened scrutiny."

Amodei acknowledged the souring sentiment around AI in a post on X in August. He said it's the result of a "crisis of trust," and that people believe companies, the government and the tech industry are always "cooking up some new way to screw them over."

Rebuilding public confidence is going to be an uphill battle as the company begins providing quarterly financial updates.

The University of Southern California published a survey on Monday that found that 71% of respondents don't trust big tech companies to act in society's best interest "at all" around data center development.

"Once you've lost trust, it's hard to gain it back," Wändi Bruine de Bruin, a professor at the University of Southern California's Schaeffer Institute, said in an interview. "The numbers are not good."

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