Cramer: Anthropic's IPO decides whether AI stocks bounce back

Anthropic's IPO is the verdict the AI trade has been waiting for, CNBC's Jim Cramer said Monday on "Mad Money." "Without it, I don't see how the AI-related stocks can make a real recovery," he said, exactly two weeks after the Claude developer filed its S-1 paperwork. Cramer went further: "I don't think it's hyperbolic to say that this could be one of the most consequential IPOs in history."

The company is pressing on despite the recent sell-off in AI names, according to the Wall Street Journal, which reported that Anthropic plans to meet major investors this week and is aiming for a trading debut as early as Thursday or Friday of next week, citing people familiar with the matter.

Cramer's argument hangs on who actually pays for the boom. The billions pouring into AI chips and data centers only pencil out if a handful of developers, Anthropic among them, eventually generate enough revenue. Anthropic, he said, sits "at the end of the food chain" for all that spending. "If it can't do that, or if it cannot convince enough investors that it will do so, then it's tough to justify all of the AI investments that are being made today."

He pointed to SpaceX as proof of how tangled the trade has become. Much of the rocket-and-AI company's recent revenue growth comes from renting out computing capacity, including to Alphabet's Google and to Anthropic. Google pays roughly $900 million a month; Anthropic's initial $1.25 billion monthly commitment has since swelled past $3 billion, per its IPO prospectus. Those contracts underwrite SpaceX's huge Nvidia chip purchases.

That's the fragile link. "If an Anthropic deal fails, then Anthropic wouldn't have the cash to fulfill its contracts, and you'd have to take down estimates for both SpaceX and Nvidia," Cramer said, adding that a long list of other compute providers to Anthropic, and their suppliers, would follow. Alphabet, Amazon and Nvidia have all invested in Anthropic, tying their earnings to its valuation.

Investor appetite, though, is thinning. Anthropic's expected valuation has slid from as much as $2 trillion earlier this fall, now as low as $1 trillion, after last week's tech sell-off tied to worries that a Democratic wave in the midterms means slower data center construction. Cramer had already flagged the offering's weight at Friday's CNBC Investing Club Annual Meeting, calling it critical for portfolio names Alphabet, Amazon and Nvidia.