Jim Cramer does not think the AI trade can heal on its own.
“Without it, I don’t see how the AI-related stocks can make a real recovery,” the “Mad Money” host said of Anthropic’s coming stock market debut, adding that it could be “one of the most consequential IPOs in history.”
That is a lot of weight for one listing to carry. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot, filed its public IPO paperwork on Oct. 26 and plans to trade under the ticker ANT.
Since then, AI stocks have taken a beating, and the deal has turned into a referendum on whether the entire spending boom can pay off.
Why Cramer sees Anthropic as the end of the AI chain
Cramer’s argument is simple. Chipmakers and data center builders are spending heavily on the belief that a few AI developers will one day earn enough to cover the bill.
Anthropic “is one of the few companies that, ultimately, needs to make money from all of this investment spending,” and if it cannot convince investors it will, “it’s tough to justify all of the AI investments that are being made today,” he said, according to CNBC.
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The size of that bill is hard to overstate. Anthropic’s filing showed it has committed at least $518 billion over roughly a decade to cloud services, computing power, and infrastructure, with about 80% of it non-cancelable or payable regardless of usage, as reported by TheStreet.
The business is growing fast enough to make that bet look less wild than it sounds. Revenue for the first half of 2026 jumped about 1,300% to $16.3 billion, and the company swung to an adjusted operating profit.
That said, it has never posted an annual profit. Moody’s analyst Raj Joshi called the turn “a strong positive for the AI ecosystem,” Wired confirmed.
Still, fast growth does not guarantee a good stock. Public investors will want quarterly proof that the company is living up to expectations, and with OpenAI competing for the same corporate and developer customers, the risk is that “pricing itself becomes the danger.”
SpaceX and Nvidia are tied to the outcome
Jim Cramer pointed to SpaceX to show how tangled the AI trade has become. Much of the rocket company’s recent growth has come from renting computing capacity to customers such as Google and Anthropic, and those contracts help pay for SpaceX’s huge Nvidia chip orders, he said.
The Anthropic deal began big and kept growing. The original agreement called for Anthropic to pay SpaceX $1.25 billion a month for computing capacity through May 2029, as reported by TheStreet.
Payments are now set to reach about $3.1 billion a month starting in December, and Anthropic accounted for more than a third of SpaceX’s third-quarter revenue. Anthropic can also walk away with 90 days’ notice beginning in early 2027.
That is why Cramer sees risk flowing in both directions. “But if an Anthropic deal fails? Then Anthropic wouldn’t have the cash to fulfil its contracts, and you’d have to take down estimates for both SpaceX and Nvidia,” along with other compute providers and their suppliers, he said.
Big Tech’s earnings are exposed, too. Amazon booked $16.8 billion in pre-tax gains from Anthropic in the first quarter, more than 40% of its pre-tax income for the period.
A lower IPO price would shrink the paper value of stakes like that one, which is exactly the kind of ripple Cramer is warning about.
An Anthropic valuation that keeps shrinking
Not long ago, the mood around the deal was euphoric. Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at a $965 billion valuation, and investors were expecting an IPO price tag of $2 trillion or more.
Those hopes began fading in October. Some current and prospective investors began talking about a value closer to $1.5 trillion, while worries about debt-funded data center projects hit companies such as CoreWeave.
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Then the election made things worse. Tech stocks sold off on Nov. 5 over concerns that the new Democratic majority in Congress could slow the data center build-out, and investors are now eyeing a valuation of between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion, according to Yahoo Finance.
Betting markets also cut the odds of an IPO before Dec. 1 to about even.
Anthropic is pushing ahead anyway. The company plans to set its valuation range and launch trading as soon as Nov. 19 or 20, while some institutional investors are pressing for a value below $1.5 trillion, TechCrunch reported.
Rival OpenAI was reportedly valued at $1.25 trillion last week after raising less money than it had sought.
What investors will watch next
The calendar is tight. The roadshow can start as soon as Nov. 10, and SEC rules put the earliest possible trading day at Nov. 16, with the shares set to list on the Nasdaq.
Amazon and Alphabet, two of Anthropic’s biggest backers, are seen as likely winners if the deal goes well.
Borrowing costs are another worry. Blackstone, an anchor investor in one of Anthropic’s chip-financing deals, now expects the company to land a junk rating rather than an investment-grade rating after the IPO, which would make its debt more expensive, the Financial Times reported.
Cramer also raised the stakes for Alphabet, Amazon, and Nvidia, all of which have invested in Anthropic, during the CNBC Investing Club’s annual meeting on Nov. 6.
If the offering goes smoothly, it could steady a shaky market. If it stumbles, the doubts about who will pay for all those chips and data centers will only intensify.
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