AI Valuation Reckoning: Anthropic's IPO Priced on $200 Billion 2028 Revenue Forecast, Not Current Earnings

AI Valuation Reckoning: Anthropic's IPO Priced on $200 Billion 2028 Revenue Forecast, Not Current Earnings​

As the market anticipates one of the largest Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) in recent history, Wall Street is undertaking an unprecedented exercise to value the generative AI firm, Anthropic. Instead of focusing on near-term profits, investment bankers and analysts are heavily leaning into long-range revenue projections to establish a price point.

Sources familiar with the company's financials indicate that Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue in the range of $190 billion to $200 billion. This ambitious future figure significantly surpasses the firm’s current operational pace, which was reported as a run rate of $47 billion as recently as May.

The use of enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on these distant forecasts is becoming standard practice for high-growth software companies that have not yet achieved mature profit profiles. However, projecting two years into the future is an aggressive move, reflecting both the explosive growth of Anthropic and the complexities inherent in valuing a company still investing heavily in core AI infrastructure.

Beyond Current Earnings: The Pressure of AI Infrastructure Spending​

Traditionally, established firms are valued based on their earnings or EBITDA, providing investors with insight into the core economics of the business. For an AI powerhouse like Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economic potential that investors expect upon reaching scale.

The rapid expansion requires enormous expenditures on GPUs, computing capacity, model training, and talent acquisition. While these expenses are crucial to supporting growth, they are anticipated to decrease as a percentage of revenue once the company achieves full scale. This changing financial trajectory is already evident in Anthropic's history.

The firm’s revenue run rate was estimated at approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025, before rising further to over $47 billion by May. Anthropic has further projected a revenue of at least $10.9 billion for the second quarter of 2026 alone.

Peer Group Analysis: Comparing AI Scale to Tech Giants​

Public market comparables are a critical component of any IPO valuation, providing investors with benchmarks from companies sharing similar growth profiles and business models. For Anthropic, reference points include cloud infrastructure provider Cloudflare, enterprise software company Palantir, and SpaceX.

The comparative metrics offer different perspectives on the risk and potential scale of an AI firm. Palantir is valued at 53 times its current year's expected revenue, placing it among Wall Street’s most highly priced stocks. Data from LSEG shows both Cloudflare and SpaceX trading near 41.6 times their expected 2026 revenue.

This peer group highlights the diverse lenses through which investors view growth in technology. While Palantir serves as a benchmark for rapid AI exposure, SpaceX represents a model of a company valued significantly on expectations for its future scale rather than its existing financial health.

The Mechanics of Hypergrowth and Margin Expansion​

The entire valuation process rests upon the expectation that Anthropic’s current massive spending is strategically funding a business capable of vastly higher revenue and greater margins later on. This growth trajectory is key to why investors are comfortable looking as far ahead as 2028 when applying a revenue multiple.

As technology advances, there is an anticipation that training and inference processes will become significantly more efficient. Likewise, personnel costs and other operating expenses could shrink relative to the rapidly expanding revenue base.

David Merkel, Principal at Aleph Investments, commented on the potential: "Could they (Anthropic) get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time." This outlook underscores that pricing Anthropic is fundamentally about betting on future productivity gains from AI itself.