Anthropic’s $200 billion revenue forecast sets the stakes for its IPO
As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, Wall Street is looking further into the future than it typically does to put a value on the AI company, with investors basing their calculations on how much revenue it could generate two years from now.
Anthropic is projecting revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion in 2028, according to Reuters. The figure has not previously been reported and dwarfs the $47 billion annual revenue run rate that the company disclosed as recently as May, highlighting the extraordinary growth investors are being asked to underwrite.
Bankers and investors are using enterprise-value-to-revenue multiples based on those forecasts.
Revenue multiples are commonly used to value high-growth software companies that have yet to establish a mature profit profile. Looking two years ahead, however, is less typical and reflects both the extraordinary pace of Anthropic’s expansion and the difficulty of establishing valuation benchmarks for a company that is still spending heavily to build out its AI infrastructure.
The scale of spending required to develop and operate AI models has also contributed to pullbacks in some of the technology sector’s most popular stocks in recent months, including companies viewed as potential comparables for Anthropic.
There are precedents for looking years into the future when valuing some of the fastest-growing companies to reach the public markets. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations ahead of its IPO this year, while projections for SpaceX extended as far as 2029 before it went public at a record valuation in June, the people said.
The approach reflects the difficulty of valuing an AI company whose margins remain under pressure from enormous spending on computing power, model training and hiring. Investors are effectively betting that as Anthropic scales, revenue will grow faster than the costs required to support that growth, allowing profit margins to expand.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Cloud infrastructure company Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir and 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.
Public-market comparables are a crucial part of the IPO valuation process, giving investors a benchmark for how companies with similar growth profiles and business models are valued. The peer group can also help determine which revenue or earnings multiples should be applied to a company’s financial forecasts.
Palantir is valued at 53 times its expected revenue for this year, making it one of Wall Street’s most highly valued stocks. SpaceX and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, according to LSEG data.
Each company offers a different lens through which investors can assess Anthropic. Palantir has become a reference point for companies with rapid growth and exposure to AI. Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure business, while SpaceX offers an example of a company whose valuation reflects expectations for its future scale as much as its current financial profile.
Established companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings or EBITDA, which provides investors with a measure of the underlying economics of a business.
For Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale. The company is spending enormous amounts on GPUs and other computing capacity, model training, inference and hiring. Those expenses are necessary to support its rapid expansion but could represent a smaller share of revenue as the business grows.
Anthropic’s financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Its revenue run rate was about $9 billion at the end of 2025, according to the company, before rising to more than $47 billion by May. Anthropic has projected revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026, more than double the previous quarter, putting it on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
The company has said its revenue run rate grew more than tenfold annually in each of the three years through early 2026.
That growth is a key reason investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple.
The valuation ultimately rests on the expectation that Anthropic’s current spending is financing a business capable of generating far greater revenue and margins in the future. Training and inference could become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could represent a smaller share of revenue as the company scales.
The Decart acquisition illustrates the other side of that equation. Anthropic is not simply waiting for computing costs to fall. It is spending billions to acquire technology that could help it use computing resources more efficiently, even as the company prepares to bring its financial story to public-market investors.
“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.
“Does AI really produce so much additional productivity? These are just questions that we have to ask if we were thinking of pricing this, buying this.”
