Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust (LSE:SMT) is one of the most talked-about FTSE 100 stocks right now due to its massive holding in SpaceX.
The rocket firm has propelled Scottish Mortgage’s share price to levels not seen since late 2021.
Yet there’s another company lurking in the portfolio that’s started to drive tasty gains…
The next mega-IPO?
The holding I’m referring to is Anthropic, the leading AI lab and maker of Claude. It’s reportedly going to attract a $965bn valuation (or thereabouts) when it goes public later this year.
This despite only being founded in 2021!
As such, it hasn’t been knocking around the Scottish Mortgage portfolio for very long (like SpaceX has). In fact, the Footsie fund’s manager — Baillie Gifford — only took a stake in September 2025.
Back then, the AI lab was valued at $183bn, indicating that this has become a multibagger in a very short period. And this incredible ascent has seen Anthropic already enter the trust‘s largest 10 holdings — rubbing shoulders with established tech giants such as Meta and Amazon.
| Holding | Portfolio Weight* | |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | SpaceX | 17.1% |
| 2 | TSMC | 6.9% |
| 3 | Nvidia | 5.7% |
| 4 | ByteDance | 4.6% |
| 5 | Amazon | 3.9% |
| 6 | Stripe | 3.5% |
| 7 | MercadoLibre | 3.3% |
| 8 | ASML | 2.8% |
| 9 | Anthropic | 2.7% |
| 10 | Meta Platforms | 2.6% |
Why not OpenAI?
Probably the most astonishing thing is just how quickly Anthropic is growing. According to co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei, Q1 revenue and usage grew 80-fold on an annualised basis, driven by widespread adoption of Claude Code, its agentic coding tool.
The company has already hit a $47bn annual run rate, with Q2 revenue set to jump to around $11bn (more than doubling quarter on quarter). And reports indicate it could even record an adjusted quarterly operating profit of more than $550m.
Anthropic has delivered one of the most remarkable growth stories in the history of enterprise software.
Scottish Mortgage
But why did Baillie Gifford plump for Anthropic over ChatGPT maker OpenAI? There appear to be a few key reasons, including:
- Anthropic’s focus on the enterprise market, which is higher-value and stickier than consumer AI chatbots.
- A focus on trust and safety makes its AI models more reliable for enterprise use.
- Beyond coding, Anthropic has built products for financial services, life sciences and other industries.
- Strong corporate culture and talent retention.
- Anthropic trains frontier AI models at roughly half the cost of rivals (supporting potentially superior margins).
What are the risks?
Of course, there’s no guarantee that Anthropic will prove to be a great investment over the long run. There’s fierce competition from OpenAI and Google, and potentially SpaceXAI in future.
Meanwhile, AI technology is evolving rapidly, so upstarts could emerge and start taking market share. If so, that could damage Anthropic’s chances of building sustainably positive cash flows.
A high valuation obviously amplifies these risks.
Beyond SpaceX and Anthropic
Scottish Mortgage holds dozens of disruptive growth stocks across both public and private markets. However, SpaceX currently represents over 20% of the entire portfolio, a position the trust can’t reduce until August.
Given this scenario, a SpaceX crash could really hit the FTSE 100 stock. At a minimum, daily turbulence is likely.
But for investors who fancy exposure to SpaceX and Anthropic — as well as other game-changing private firms like Stripe and Revolut — I think the trust is worth considering. Especially after a 6% pullback has left it trading at a 10.4% discount to net asset value.
Should you invest £5,000 in Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Plc right now?
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Ben McPoland owns shares in MercadoLibre, Nvidia, Scottish Mortgage, TSMC.
