By Echo Wang
Aug 14 (Reuters) - As Anthropic prepares for what could be one of the biggest IPOs on record, Wall Street is looking further into the future than it commonly does to put a price on the AI company, valuing it based on how much revenue it could generate two years from now.
Anthropic is projecting 2028 revenue of roughly $190 billion to $200 billion, according to two people familiar with the company's financials, a figure that has not previously been reported. The projection dwarfs the $47
billion revenue "run rate," reflecting the firm's current pace of business, that the company publicized as recently as May, and shows the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.
Bankers and investors are using enterprise value-to-revenue multiples based on forecasts, four sources said.
Using revenue multiples is common for high-growth software companies that have yet to establish a mature profit profile.
But looking two years ahead is less typical, reflecting the speed at which Anthropic's business is expanding and the challenges of setting benchmarks for a company still spending heavily to build out its AI infrastructure, the people said.
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.
There have been precedents among some of the fastest-growing companies that hit the market recently. 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 people said.
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. Investors are betting that as Anthropic grows, revenue will rise faster than the costs required to support that growth, allowing margins to expand.
Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
SEARCHING FOR COMPS
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.
Public-market comparables are a crucial part of the IPO valuation process, giving investors a benchmark for how companies seen as having 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 this year's expected revenue, making it one of Wall Street's priciest stocks. SpaceX and Cloudflare both trade at 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, LSEG data show.
Each of the companies offers a different lens on Anthropic. Palantir has become a reference point for investors valuing businesses with rapid growth and exposure to AI. Cloudflare provides a comparison with a high-growth software and infrastructure company, while SpaceX offers an example of a company valued in part on expectations for its future scale rather than its current financial profile.
LOOKING PAST CURRENT EARNINGS
Established companies are typically valued more heavily on earnings, or EBITDA, which gives investors a sense of the economics of the business.
For Anthropic, however, current EBITDA does not fully capture the economics investors expect the company to achieve at scale. Anthropic 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 become a smaller percentage of revenue as the business grows.
The company's financial trajectory already shows how quickly that equation is changing. Anthropic's 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, on track for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
The company has said its revenue run rate grew more than 10-fold 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 therefore rests on the expectation that Anthropic's current spending is funding a business that will eventually generate much higher revenue and margins. Training and inference could become more efficient as technology improves, while personnel and other operating costs could become a smaller share of revenue as the company scales.
"Could they (Anthropic) 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 (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."
(Reporting by Echo Wang in New York, editing by Colin Barr and Rosalba O'Brien)
