Anthropic is preparing for one of the most hotly anticipated IPOs in history — and, after a dramatic turn of events, it will do so just a week after the AI industry lost one of its most powerful figures and best salesmen.

Nvidia's longtime chief executive and co-founder, Jensen Huang, resigned from the company on Thursday, ending a run spanning more than three decades at the chipmaker he co-founded in 1993, following reports alleging he had engaged in two extramarital affairs: one with a customer suspected by U.S. intelligence of being a Chinese intelligence asset, and another with an Nvidia executive who reports to him. Fortune detailed the circumstances of Huang's exit in its Nov. 11 report.

The timing has thrown fresh pressure on Anthropic's listing, which was already seen as a stress test of investors' appetite for AI. The AI lab — which set its IPO price range amid a broader AI stock sell-off, according to Fortune's earlier coverage — is expected to list on Wednesday or Thursday next week, days after Nvidia reports quarterly earnings: the chipmaker's first-ever results without Huang at the helm. The back-to-back calendar hands investors two major AI milestones — a leadership transition at Nvidia and one of the most closely watched listings in years — within days of each other.

A close partnership under strain

Nvidia is a close partner of Anthropic and intimately involved in the lab's upcoming IPO. According to Anthropic's filings, the chipmaker has agreed to buy roughly $10 billion of shares in a $26 billion private placement — a sale of stock to selected investors alongside the public offering. The two companies are also closely tied commercially, with Anthropic committing tens of billions of dollars to secure access to Nvidia's most advanced chips.

Investors and analysts told Fortune that while they do not expect the Nvidia shock to affect Anthropic's core business, it could create problems for the broader AI story.

Jay Goldberg, an analyst at Seaport Research Partners and one of the few on Wall Street with a sell rating on Nvidia's stock, does not expect Huang's exit to derail the deal. “They're going to go public right in the face of Nvidia's earnings call, and I don't think that derails it,” he said. “It's such a massive IPO and there's so many people behind it now that they don't pull the IPO.”

The bigger risk, he said, arrives once Anthropic is a public company. Speaking shortly before Huang's departure but after reports that he was likely to leave, Goldberg warned that turmoil at Nvidia, including the loss of its CEO, would create a headwind when Anthropic reports its first quarterly results. “At the very least it will create this narrative of, ‘Can the AI narrative maintain? Can we keep doing this?’” he said. “They'll get much tougher questions.”

Karl Alomar, a partner at venture firm M13, agreed that Anthropic's fundamentals remain intact. “From where I stand, Anthropic is still in as good, as strong a position as it was before this news came out,” he said. “Anthropic's numbers are fantastic, and they've clearly shown that they have excess capacity for what they need. They haven't spent that much money.”

Anthropic is also less dependent on Nvidia than some of its rivals, running some models on Google's TPUs, Amazon's Trainium chips, and AMD's GPUs in addition to Nvidia's hardware. The company has also reportedly been exploring building its own chips.

Scrutiny could extend to partners

“Nvidia has committed to invest $10 billion in the Anthropic IPO. That will likely still happen when the IPO eventually happens,” said Francine McKenna, an accountant and investigative journalist who has taught at the Wharton School. “But anyone who was looking at Nvidia to bail out CoreWeave if needed should probably look elsewhere.” CoreWeave, the Nvidia-backed AI cloud provider that went public in 2025, builds its data centers on Nvidia's chips.

Nvidia's recent troubles and the questions surrounding its chief executive's judgment could nonetheless spill over into greater scrutiny of its partners, according to Jason Schloetzer, an associate professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. He said he expected “much closer scrutiny of [Anthropic's] ties to Nvidia and customers associated with Nvidia.”

High stakes for the AI boom

For Silicon Valley, the implications reach well beyond Anthropic itself. The company — founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, including siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei — and rival OpenAI have needed so much capital that nearly every venture capital firm in town owns a piece of them, making them the private-market equivalent of an index fund. That makes Anthropic's expected IPO next week a high-stakes liquidity event — not only for the lab's more than 400 backers, but for the AI boom as a whole. There is a broad sense that if Anthropic succeeds, the AI boom has far more runway; if it flops or is pushed back indefinitely, it would be an unequivocal negative signal that the AI bubble is heading toward a pop.

It may not be a bust. At least one venture capitalist sees clear upside for Anthropic. CEO Dario Amodei has long pushed for tighter controls on chip exports to China, putting him at odds with Huang. Anthropic has likewise clashed with Huang on AI regulation, with Huang particularly keen to avoid licensing requirements that would make it more difficult for customers to adopt open-source AI models.

“If anything, I think Anthropic is a beneficiary here,” said the investor, who asked not to be named given the situation's sensitivity and their investments across AI. “They weren't that close to Jensen…They're building their own chip, and so the supply chain considerations that get freed up are good for Anthropic.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.