Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on $190-200 billion 2028 revenue forecast

Anthropic projects $190-200 billion in 2028 revenue, more than four times its $47 billion run rate, as bankers value the AI company on forward multiples ahead of what could be one of the largest IPOs on record.

"Could they get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time," said David Merkel, a principal at investment firm Aleph Investments.

The projection, previously unreported, dwarfs the revenue run rate the company publicized in May, which itself had climbed from about $9 billion at the end of 2025. Anthropic has projected second-quarter revenue of at least $10.9 billion, more than double the prior quarter, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million. The company's revenue run rate grew more than 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026.

Bankers and investors are applying enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts extending two years into the future — a less typical approach that reflects both Anthropic's rapid expansion and the difficulty of setting benchmarks for a company still spending heavily on computing infrastructure. The valuation rests on the expectation that revenue will eventually rise faster than the costs of GPUs, model training and inference, allowing margins to expand as the business scales.

Searching for Comparables

Cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir and Elon Musk's SpaceX are among the public companies being considered as reference points for Anthropic's valuation ahead of the company's analyst day, the people said. Palantir trades at 53 times this year's expected revenue, making it one of Wall Street's priciest stocks, while SpaceX and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, LSEG data show.

Each offers a different lens on Anthropic's business. Palantir has become a benchmark for investors valuing rapid-growth companies with AI exposure, Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure firm, and SpaceX demonstrates how a company can be valued on expectations for future scale rather than its current financial profile.

There have been precedents among fast-growing companies that recently hit the market. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations in the runup to the firm's IPO this year, and SpaceX projections extended as far as 2029 before the company went public at a record valuation in June. The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing an AI company whose margins are still being pressured by enormous spending on computing power, model training and hiring.

The Margin Equation

The pace of spending on AI investment has been responsible for pullbacks in many of the most popular tech stocks in recent months, including some of the firms viewed as comparable to Anthropic. For the company itself, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect it to achieve at scale, given enormous outlays on GPUs, computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring.

Those expenses are necessary to support rapid expansion but could become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows. Training and inference could become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could shrink as a share of revenue at scale.

The stakes extend beyond Anthropic. If the company achieves its 2028 targets, it would validate the broader thesis that AI infrastructure spending translates into durable revenue growth across the sector. If it falls short, the pullback in AI-related stocks could accelerate, given how much of the current valuation depends on forward-looking projections rather than current earnings.

"Does it really produce so much additional productivity... These are just questions that we have to ask if we were thinking of pricing this, buying this," Merkel said.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The company filed confidentially for its IPO in June, and pricing details including the offer range and shares to be sold have not yet been disclosed. The analyst day, expected in the coming weeks, will be the first opportunity for investors to assess the company's growth trajectory against the aggressive revenue targets.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.