Anthropic will price one of the most anticipated IPOs in history next week without Jensen Huang at Nvidia, after the chipmaker's co-founder resigned Thursday following reports of two extramarital affairs — one with a customer U.S. intelligence suspects of being a Chinese intelligence asset, and one with an Nvidia executive reporting directly to him.

The timing compresses risk. Anthropic is expected to list Wednesday or Thursday, days after Nvidia reports quarterly earnings — the company's first-ever without Huang as chief executive. Nvidia is not a bystander to the deal: per Anthropic's filings, it has agreed to buy roughly $10 billion of shares in a $26 billion private placement alongside the IPO. The two companies are also bound commercially, with Anthropic committing tens of billions of dollars to secure access to Nvidia's most advanced chips.

What does the Huang exit change?

Not the deal itself, according to most analysts. Jay Goldberg of Seaport Research Partners — one of the few Wall Street analysts with a sell rating on Nvidia — said the listing will proceed regardless.

"They're going to go public right in the face of Nvidia's earnings call, and I don't think that derails it," Goldberg said. "It's such a massive IPO and there's so many people behind it now that they don't pull the IPO."

The greater risk, he argued, arrives after the listing. Speaking before Huang's departure but after reports he was likely to leave, Goldberg said turmoil at Nvidia would create a headwind when Anthropic reports its first quarterly results as a public company.

"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, said the fundamentals have not moved. "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."

How exposed is Anthropic to Nvidia?

Less than some rivals. Anthropic runs models on Google's TPUs, Amazon's Trainium chips and AMD's GPUs alongside Nvidia hardware, and has reportedly explored building its own silicon.

Francine McKenna, an accountant and investigative journalist who has taught at the Wharton School, expects Nvidia's $10 billion commitment to hold. "Nvidia has committed to invest $10 billion in the Anthropic IPO. That will likely still happen when the IPO eventually happens," she said. "But anyone who was looking at Nvidia to bail out CoreWeave if needed should probably look elsewhere."

Jason Schloetzer, an associate professor at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business, said questions surrounding the CEO's judgment could raise scrutiny of Nvidia's partners. He expects "much closer scrutiny of [Anthropic's] ties to Nvidia and customers associated with Nvidia."

Why does this IPO carry so much weight?

Anthropic and rival OpenAI have consumed so much capital that nearly every venture firm in Silicon Valley holds a stake — the private-market equivalent of an index fund. Next week's listing is therefore a liquidity event for Anthropic's more than 400 backers and a stress test for the entire AI boom. Success suggests the boom has far more runway; a flop or indefinite delay would signal the AI bubble is heading toward a pop.

At least one venture capitalist sees upside. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has long pushed for tighter China chip-export controls, putting him at odds with Huang, and the two have clashed over AI regulation — Huang resisting licensing requirements that would slow open-source adoption.

"If anything, I think Anthropic is a beneficiary here," said the investor, who asked not to be named given the sensitivity and their AI holdings. "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."

The market's verdict arrives next week.