Anthropic's IPO valuation hinges on $200 billion 2028 revenue forecast

As Anthropic prepares for a potential record-breaking initial public offering, Wall Street is adopting an unusually long-term view to determine the company's worth. According to sources familiar with the matter, the AI firm is projecting revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion for 2028. This figure is significantly higher than the $47 billion annualized revenue run rate the company publicized in May, underscoring the massive growth investors are being asked to underwrite.

Bankers and investors are reportedly using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on these future forecasts. While this method is common for high-growth software companies without mature profit profiles, looking two years ahead is less typical. It reflects the rapid expansion of Anthropic's business and the difficulty of setting benchmarks for a company still heavily investing in AI infrastructure.

The approach is not without precedent. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue expectations before its IPO, and SpaceX's projections extended to 2029 prior to its public listing in June. The strategy highlights the challenge of valuing an AI company whose margins are pressured by enormous spending on computing power, model training, and hiring. Investors are betting that revenue will eventually outpace these costs, allowing margins to expand.

In the search for comparable companies, Cloudflare, Palantir, and SpaceX are being considered as reference points ahead of Anthropic's analyst day. These public-market comps provide a benchmark for how similar growth profiles are valued. Palantir, for instance, trades at 53 times this year's expected revenue, while SpaceX and Cloudflare trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue. Each offers a different lens: Palantir for AI exposure, Cloudflare for high-growth software, and SpaceX for valuation based on future scale.

Anthropic's current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect at scale, given its heavy spending on GPUs, training, and hiring. The company's trajectory shows rapid change, with its revenue run rate jumping from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $47 billion by May. It has projected at least $10.9 billion in revenue for the second quarter of 2026, targeting its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million. This growth, which has exceeded 10-fold annually in each of the three years through early 2026, is why investors are willing to look as far ahead as 2028.

The valuation ultimately rests on the belief that current spending will fund a business generating much higher revenue and margins over time. As technology improves, training and inference costs could become more efficient, and operating costs could shrink as a percentage of revenue. However, questions remain about whether such a valuation can hold. "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 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."