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Zoom's Anthropic Stake and Huge Cash Pile Could Change the Story
Reported by Jeffrey Neal Johnson. Published: 1/27/2026.
Quick Look
- Zoom maintains a fortress balance sheet with significant liquidity that supports the stock price while enabling flexible capital allocation strategies.
- The strategic equity investment in Anthropic offers shareholders a unique proxy method to gain exposure to the high-growth private artificial intelligence market.
- Including advanced artificial intelligence features at no extra cost creates a strong competitive moat that helps retain enterprise customers against larger rivals.
For the past several years, the investment narrative surrounding Zoom Video Communications (NASDAQ: ZM) has been fairly one-dimensional. The discussion centered on return-to-office trends and whether the company could sustain growth after the pandemic. As of late January 2026, with the stock trading around $95, sentiment is shifting. Smart money is beginning to look past quarterly churn in video calling and focus on a large, underappreciated asset on Zoom's balance sheet.
Investors are increasingly viewing Zoom not just as a software utility but as a deep-value holding company. The main catalyst for that change is a strategic, early-stage investment in Anthropic, one of the world's leading artificial intelligence (AI) firms. That equity stake gives Zoom shareholders indirect exposure to the private AI market and forces a re-evaluation of what Zoom stock is really worth.
The Anthropic Factor: Accessing the AI Boom Through a Proxy
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See JC's latest market forecast hereTo make the bullish case for Zoom, investors must consider its venture portfolio. In May 2023, Zoom Ventures made a strategic investment in Anthropic. At the time it felt like a standard partnership, but Anthropic—the creator of the Claude models—has since established itself as a top-tier competitor to OpenAI (ChatGPT) and Alphabet's (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google DeepMind.
The timing of Zoom's investment was advantageous. By buying in during 2023, Zoom secured its stake before the valuation surges that swept the AI sector in late 2024 and 2025. While tech giants like Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) and Google have also committed large sums to Anthropic, Zoom's much smaller market capitalization means a successful liquidity event for Anthropic (such as an IPO) would move the needle far more for Zoom shareholders than for a trillion-dollar mega-cap.
For retail investors, that presents a unique opportunity. Anthropic remains private, so you can't buy its shares on a public exchange. Owning Zoom stock, however, acts as a proxy: as Anthropic's valuation rises in the private markets, the value of Zoom's stake increases as well. That appreciation creates paper gains on Zoom's balance sheet that aren't captured by standard revenue metrics but nevertheless add tangible asset value.
The $7.9 Billion Cushion: A Mathematical Floor for the Stock
The presence of an appreciating AI asset has prompted analysts to apply a sum-of-the-parts valuation. This method values a company by breaking it into component assets rather than judging it solely by its price-to-earnings ratio (P/E). Viewed this way, Zoom appears to be trading at a discount to many software peers.
Start with Zoom's fortress balance sheet: it currently holds about $7.9 billion in cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities and effectively carries no debt.
Here's how the valuation math looks for a value investor:
- Total market cap: The market values Zoom at roughly $27 billion.
- Subtract the cash: Removing the $7.9 billion cash pile leaves the business operations valued at roughly $19.1 billion.
- Subtract the Anthropic stake: Further subtracting an estimated value for Zoom's Anthropic holding (about $2 billion to $4 billion) yields a remaining valuation that represents what you're paying for the core business.
Put differently, investors are effectively buying Zoom's profitable core operations—Meetings, Phone, and Contact Center—at unusually low multiples. The cash and the AI stake provide a margin of safety and a financial floor that limits downside, since the company's assets alone support a meaningful portion of the stock price regardless of short-term revenue swings.
The Federated Moat: How Ownership Powers Product Strategy
The Anthropic relationship is more than a potential financial windfall; it's a defensive product strategy against competitors like Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT). Microsoft's deep alliance with OpenAI powers its Copilot features. If Zoom were forced to license equivalent AI services at market rates, its profit margins would suffer.
Instead, Zoom employs a federated AI approach that routes tasks to different models based on performance and cost. Thanks to its ownership stake and strategic partnership, Zoom has privileged access to Anthropic's Claude model. Claude's large context window enables it to read and summarize substantial amounts of text—an hour-long meeting transcript, for example—more accurately than many alternatives.
That economic edge lets Zoom undercut the prevailing market pricing model. Competitors sometimes charge a premium—up to $30 per user per month—for AI add-ons. Zoom, by contrast, includes its AI Companion at no additional cost for paid license holders.
It's a classic moat. By packaging premium AI features into existing subscriptions, Zoom boosts the value of its service and reduces churn. That makes it harder for a CFO to justify switching an organization to Microsoft Teams: the bundle might look cheaper on paper, but the business would lose free, high-quality AI tools employees rely on.
A Value Play in a Growth Market
Zoom's investment thesis has evolved. In 2020 it was a speculative hyper-growth bet; in 2026 it looks more like a calculated value play driven by asset appreciation. The company has transitioned from a simple video app into a mature platform with diversified revenue and strategic assets.
Although the core business faces headwinds from slowing growth, downside risk is cushioned by the $7.9 billion cash reserve and a management team focused on disciplined capital allocation. Combine that safety net with the speculative upside of the Anthropic stake, and the stock's risk-reward profile appears compelling.
For investors who felt they missed the initial AI gold rush, Zoom offers a second chance: exposure to one of the most important private AI companies via a profitable, cash-rich public company. It may not be the flashiest name on the Nasdaq, but the math suggests it could be one of the most overlooked.
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