Anthropic’s path to the Nasdaq just got a lot bumpier

Anthropic picked a tough week to unveil its IPO prospectus.

Within days of its release, several of the company’s key partners, including Microsoft, Google and Amazon, reported quarterly results that added fuel to existing market jitters around the artificial intelligence buildout.

“Everybody’s still full steam ahead on AI, but all the things around it took an interesting turn this week,” Daniel Newman, CEO at Futurum Group, told CNBC in an interview on Friday. The hyperscalers’ results have “raised eyebrows” and created a new headwind in the market, which is “more doubt on capital structure,” he said.

No matter the current state of the market, Anthropic was going to have to address a skeptical investor base as it pursues a potentially record-setting initial public offering in the coming weeks. In its prospectus on Monday, the AI company disclosed a net loss for the first half of the year of $80 billion, alongside hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of compute commitments and more than 90 pages of risk factors. Investors are still waiting to see Anthropic’s third-quarter financials.

Heading into this week, fears were mounting about the financial health of neoclouds like CoreWeave and Nebius, which are facing rising borrowing costs and a dearth of lenders as they pursue aggressive AI buildouts. Anthropic gets much of its capacity from Amazon, Google and SpaceX, but it also relies on neoclouds for some compute as it races to expand as quickly as possible.

Now investors are growing increasingly worried about the whole AI trade.

“It’s a great technology, seems to do things that we never would have imagined, but how does that then translate into a viable business?” David Hsu, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton School, said in an interview.

The Nasdaq Composite notched its first three-week losing streak since March after plunging 2.9% on Friday. Nvidia, whose graphics processing units have powered the AI boom, traded lower, along with the whole semiconductor sector, after Intel issued a weak forecast, sending its stock to its steepest drop since the 1970s.

Microsoft, Google and Amazon all had notes of concern this week in their reports. The companies have been on a spending blitz in recent years to meet the surge in demand for AI infrastructure, but all three issued capex figures or forecasts that came in below analysts’ estimates. Microsoft lowered its capex forecast for the year to $170 billion from $175 billion, while Alphabet maintained its guidance for up to $205 billion and Amazon reiterated its roughly $220 billion forecast.

“It’s been an ugly reporting season for tech thus far,” Jonathan Krinsky, managing director at BTIG, wrote in a Thursday note. He described the…