- Anthropic is heading for what's expected to be a historic IPO.
- Analyst Gil Luria says the company will ultimately be a "speculative" investment.
- The model makers will not be the big winners of the AI boom, Luria said.
Anthropic's looming IPO will be a historic market event, but it's trajectory after becoming a public company is a topic of debate.
According to longtime analyst Gil Luria, Anthropic will prove to be a "very speculative" investment.
The DA Davidson analyst, who serves as head of technology research for the firm, shared his take on Anthropic and the broader AI trade in a conversation with CNBC on Monday. Luria said that determining the winner of the AI model race may be meaningless for investors, as the real growth opportunity remains with already-established hyperscalers and infrastructure providers.
"Anthropic will end up being a very speculative investment," Luria said. "They may do well, they may not."
Anthropic's financials have come under the microscope as it begins shopping its hotly anticipated IPO. The company reported nearly $17 billion in revenue in the third quarter, marking a slowdown in growth compared to second-quarter figures. AI doomers were quick to point the revenue numbers as a sign the AI trade is stumbling.
Luria, who has advised investors to shake off AI market scares, isn't among the market bears, but he views Anthropic's post-IPO success as less important to the ongoing strength of the broader AI trade.
"They were at peak power earlier this year," he said of Anthropic. "They had almost the entire enterprise market. That's when their growth was really skyrocketing. What happened since then is OpenAI caught up, and enterprises realized they were spending so much that they had to start using open weight models as well, and that's why Anthropic decelerated."
That said, Luria acknowledged that if the Anthropic IPO were to disappoint, it would mean a temporary disruption for the AI trade, which would likely spook some investors. However, in his view, the market only needs a "reasonably successful" Anthropic IPO for the AI trade to remain strong.
He added that there are a few important questions to determine the health of the AI sector: are people using AI models more than previously and are they paying more for them?
As long as the answer to both is yes, Luria isn't focused on the models themselves, but rather on the companies providing the infrastructure on which the AI boom runs.
"That means AI investments are going to continue, and that's good for your Microsoft, your Amazon, and Google because they're going to be the ones serving it, and they're going to be buying chips primarily from Nvidia, Broadcom, Micron," he added.
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