Claude Just Ate Sam's Lunch. While On the NGX, Are We Paying for Pepper Soup at Caviar Prices?

Anthropic — the AI company founded by ex-OpenAI employees who basically said "we can do this, but responsibly" — just closed a $65 billion Series H funding round at a $965 billion valuation, making it the most valuable private AI company on the planet. Yes, that means it officially sits above OpenAI, the company that practically invented this entire conversation (pun intended).

For context: the round was led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, GreenOak's, and Sequoia Capital, and puts Anthropic's valuation above its rival OpenAI. They raised $65 billion in a single round. That's not a funding round; that's a small country's GDP walking through the door with a handshake.

The $65 billion raise is one of the largest private funding rounds in technology history, and according to reports, it may be Anthropic's final private fundraise before an IPO. That's right, an IPO may be coming.

What drove this? Two words: enterprise trust. Anthropic's rise came by doubling down on delivering generative AI to enterprise clients rather than general users — the path initially chosen by OpenAI. While OpenAI was busy being famous, Anthropic quietly became indispensable. It's the difference between the friend everyone knows at the party and the friend who fixes your car when it breaks down at 11pm.

The star of the show? Claude Mythos Preview — a model with advanced cybersecurity capabilities, only available to a select group of companies, which has sparked high-profile meetings between members of the Trump administration, tech CEOs, and bank executives. Whatever's in that model, it has very important people in very expensive suits suddenly very interested.

The valuation math is still… optimistic. Anthropic earned about $9 billion in revenue in 2025, meaning its latest valuation implies a price-to-sales ratio of roughly 39x (market cap of $350bn as at year end 2025) — which, for the non-finance people reading this, is the equivalent of paying ₦39 for every ₦1 of revenue a business generates. In most industries, that would make someone choke on their tea. In AI in 2026, investors are calling it a bargain.

Whether this is visionary or vertigo-inducing depends entirely on whether you believe AI will reshape the global economy in the next decade. The market clearly does. The rest of us are watching with our popcorn.

Now, let's come home.

The Nigerian Exchange All-Share Index is up 60.90% YTD. Market capitalisation sits at roughly ₦160 trillion ($117 billion). The index has more than doubled in 12 months. Your portfolio probably looks like a motivational poster right now.

But somewhere between the euphoria and the next stock alert notification, a very important question deserves an honest answer: Are we overvalued?

The short answer: kind of, but it's complicated — which is the financial equivalent of your doctor saying, "the results are interesting."

At above 11x trailing earnings, the NGX appears strikingly cheap compared to its peers. The MSCI Emerging Markets Index trades at 17x. South Africa's JSE sits at 17x. Morocco's MASI commands 21x. India is at 23.5x. On a raw price-to-earnings basis, Nigeria looks like a bargain on every screen.

But raw P/E does not factor in the high-inflation, currency-volatile markets which the NGX operates at. Nigeria's CPI ran above 34% as recently as late 2024. And with the remarkable disinflation achieved under the CBN's tight monetary policy — bringing headline inflation down to 15.69% by April 2026 — the naira's devaluation since the unification of exchange rates in mid-2023 has permanently distorted how we read Nigerian corporate earnings.

A Nigerian company that earned the equivalent of $5 in profits in 2015 may report ₦5,000 today — but at the current exchange rate, that translates to roughly $3.70. The P/E looks cheap; the real earnings power is not.

When the naira collapses and then stabilises, nominal earnings swell from FX revaluation gains on foreign-currency assets, from inflation pass-through in consumer prices. A significant portion of 2025 reported earnings were driven by FX gains. Strip those out, and the earnings base supporting the 11x multiple may be thinner than it first appears.

The Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings ratio — which smooths earnings over a ten-year period to remove cyclical distortions — is more instructive here than the single-year trailing multiple.

Calculated in naira terms, Nigeria's CAPE sits at approximately 20x, against a historical average of 10x to 13x. That is trading at a premium to its own long-run norm. When a market is paying above what it has historically thought was fair value for itself... that's the stock market equivalent of buying suya and being charged restaurant prices for it without the ambience.

But — and this is crucial — context matters enormously. When compared with the MSCI Emerging Markets Index at 17x, the NGX at 11x trades at a 35% discount. Within Africa, Nigeria is cheaper than South Africa at 17x, Egypt at 17x, and Morocco at 23x. So relative to peers, we're not the most expensive dish on the menu.

The rally also wasn't built entirely on air. This year's ASI surge has largely been driven by strong FY2025 earnings, naira stabilisation, CBN reserves at a 13-year high of $49 billion, and banking recapitalisation milestones. That's a real fundamental story, not just momentum chasing.

So, what's the verdict? The NGX is expensive by its own history, but not necessarily by global or African standards. Think of it like this: the market ran ahead of earnings. It's a fit athlete who sprinted too fast and now needs the earnings to catch up on the next lap. If corporate profits grow into current prices, this rally has legs. If they don't, correction could be possible.

The bond market is watching too. With FGN bonds yielding 17% on 10-year paper and T-bills at 19% — both risk-free — equities need to offer a compelling return premium to justify the risk. At current valuations, that premium is thinning. Investors are already rotating at the margins, which might explain some of the profit-taking dips we've seen in recent weeks.

Globally: Anthropic just redefined the AI race. The message to markets is clear — the "responsible AI" bet is being richly rewarded, enterprise is where the money is, and if you blinked, you missed one of the biggest private funding moments in tech history.

Locally: The NGX rally has been remarkable and partially deserved. But at a current 60% YTD gain, some humility is warranted. The market isn't in bubble territory by global comparison, but it's in "be selective, know what you own, and don't chase" territory.