Digital
Anthropic’s IPO valuation hinges on a $200 billion revenue target for 2028
Investors are looking two years ahead as AI spending makes current earnings hard to gauge
MUMBAI: Anthropic’s IPO may be priced on a number that sounds more like a distant destination than a near-term forecast: up to $200 billion in revenue in 2028. The artificial intelligence company is projecting roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in revenue for that year, according to two people familiar with its financials, as bankers and investors look well beyond its current earnings to assess a potential blockbuster listing.
The forecast is almost four times Anthropic’s publicly disclosed revenue run rate of more than $47 billion in May, highlighting the scale of growth investors are being asked to price into the company’s valuation, according to a Reuters report.
Rather than relying heavily on earnings or EBITDA, bankers and investors are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on future forecasts, according to four people familiar with the discussions. Looking two years ahead is unusual for a company preparing for an IPO, but Anthropic’s rapid growth and heavy spending on AI infrastructure make conventional valuation measures harder to apply.
Anthropic’s valuation case rests on the assumption that its huge investments in computing power, model training and hiring will eventually translate into much larger revenue and wider margins.
The company’s revenue run rate was around $9 billion at the end of 2025 before climbing past $47 billion by May 2026. Anthropic has also projected at least $10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, more than twice the previous quarter, with the company on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
Anthropic has said its revenue run rate grew more than tenfold annually in each of the three years through early 2026.
That pace is encouraging investors to look further into the future, particularly as current profitability remains distorted by the cost of building and running increasingly powerful AI models.
The underlying bet is that computing, training and inference costs will eventually become a smaller share of revenue as the business scales and technology becomes more efficient.
With no obvious mature-company template for Anthropic, investors are looking at a range of high-growth businesses as valuation benchmarks.
Cloudflare, Palantir Technologies and SpaceX are among the companies being considered as reference points ahead of Anthropic’s analyst day, according to the people familiar with the matter.
Public-market comparables can help investors determine which revenue multiple should be applied to Anthropic’s forecasts.
Palantir trades at around 53 times expected 2026 revenue, while SpaceX and Cloudflare trade at about 41.6 times, according to LSEG data cited in the report.
Each offers a different valuation lens. Palantir provides a comparison with a rapidly growing business with strong AI exposure. Cloudflare offers a high-growth software and infrastructure benchmark, while SpaceX demonstrates how investors can place significant weight on future scale rather than current financial performance.
The approach also underlines the uncertainty surrounding AI valuations. Heavy investment in GPUs, data-centre capacity, model development and talent can suppress margins even as revenue surges.
Investors are effectively betting that Anthropic’s growth will eventually outpace those costs.
There are precedents for stretching IPO forecasts into the future. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations ahead of its IPO this year, while SpaceX investors looked as far ahead as 2029 before its record valuation in June.
Still, the numbers leave plenty of room for debate. David Merkel, principal at Aleph Investments, questioned whether a potential $2 trillion valuation for Anthropic could hold over time and whether AI would ultimately generate enough additional productivity to justify such pricing.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
For now, the IPO story is less about what Anthropic earns today than what investors believe it can become by 2028. With a potential $200 billion revenue target on the table, Wall Street is effectively being asked to value the AI giant on tomorrow’s promise, not today’s profits.
