Exclusive: Anthropic IPO valuation hinges on 2028 revenue forecast of $190-$200 billion, sources say
By Echo Wang
Aug 14 (Reuters) - Wall Street is pricing Anthropic less on where the artificial-intelligence company is today than on where it could be in 2028, with investors focusing on an internal revenue projection of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to two people familiar with its financials.
That forecast, not previously reported, is central to the valuation work ahead of what could be one of the largest initial public offerings on record. It dwarfs the $47 billion annualized revenue run rate Anthropic disclosed in May and underscores the scale of expansion investors are being asked to underwrite.
Bankers and investors are applying enterprise value-to-revenue multiples to those 2028 numbers, four sources said. The approach is common for high-growth software companies with immature profit profiles, but stretching the horizon two years out is less typical. It reflects both the speed of Anthropic's growth and the difficulty of finding a conventional yardstick for a company still spending heavily on computing power and AI infrastructure.
The wider market's anxiety about that spending has already contributed to sell-offs in major tech stocks in recent months, including companies viewed as comparable to Anthropic. The IPO pricing strategy, by looking further into the future, is effectively asking public investors to underwrite a much larger payoff before current earnings catch up.
Looking for comparable companies
Ahead of Anthropic's analyst day, bankers and investors have been studying Cloudflare, Palantir and SpaceX as reference points, the people said. Each offers a different lens. Palantir trades at around 53 times expected revenue this year, making it one of the priciest large-cap software names. Cloudflare and SpaceX are each valued at about 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, according to LSEG data.
Comparable companies help set the earnings or revenue multiples used in an IPO. For Anthropic, however, the current profit picture is only part of the story. The company's spending on GPUs, model training, inference and hiring is compressing margins, but those costs could become a smaller share of revenue if growth continues to compound.
There are precedents for looking this far ahead. Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations in the runup to its IPO this year, and SpaceX used projections extending as far as 2029 before going public in June at a record valuation, the people said.
Betting on scale
Anthropic's own numbers show how quickly the equation is changing. The company said its revenue run rate rose from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $47 billion by May. It has projected second-quarter 2026 revenue of at least $10.9 billion, more than double the prior quarter, 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 kind of growth is why investors are willing to look as far out as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple, even though margins are still under pressure from heavy capital spending.
Established companies are typically valued largely on earnings or EBITDA, which gives a picture of the underlying economics. For Anthropic, current EBITDA does not fully capture what investors expect at scale. Training and inference could become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could take up a smaller percentage of revenue as the company grows.
“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 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.”
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
(Reporting by Echo Wang in New York; editing by Colin Barr and Rosalba O'Brien)