Anthropic’s path to a potential $2 trillion IPO valuation is being built on an exceptionally aggressive internal forecast, projecting revenue between $190 billion and $200 billion by 2028. This previously unreported figure is reportedly forming the cornerstone of the AI lab’s public listing strategy, with bankers and investors using this futuristic target to justify a price tag that would place it among the most valuable companies in the world. The scale of this ambition is staggering when contextualized against Anthropic’s current financials: the company’s revenue run rate was roughly $47 billion as of May 2026, a significant leap from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025. That reported 2028 target implies the company must more than quadruple its revenue in just over two years, an acceleration that only makes sense within the current AI investment boom.
The near-term financial trajectory shows momentum to support these ambitious projections, as second-quarter 2026 revenue is projected to hit at least $10.9 billion—more than double the previous quarter—with the company eyeing its first quarterly operating profit of around $559 million. For a lab that has spent most of its existence burning through cash reserves, reaching operational profitability would represent a genuine inflection point, allowing bankers to argue that the forecasts are a matter of extrapolation rather than fantasy. Rather than pricing Anthropic on its present earnings, investment bankers are reportedly applying enterprise-value-to-revenue multiples to the 2028 forecasts, a two-years-forward approach rarely seen in public markets but previously deployed ahead of the flotations of Cerebras and SpaceX. This methodology is specifically engineered for companies growing too rapidly to be valued on their current financial standing, with comparable companies like Palantir trading at roughly 53 times expected 2026 revenue, while SpaceX and Cloudflare sit around 41.6 times those figures.
However, the entire valuation structure borrows heavily from the future and assumes that current market enthusiasm will persist long enough to meet the growth projections it is pricing in. David Merkel of Aleph Investments captured the prevailing skepticism, noting, „Could they get a $2 trillion valuation, yeah they could and I just wonder if it would stay there over time,” highlighting the gap between what a hot market will pay on a given day and what it will tolerate a year later. The caveats lie within Anthropic’s cost base, where heavy spending on GPUs, compute infrastructure, and model training is currently pressuring margins. The bull case rests on assumptions that these costs will decline as a share of revenue as the business scales—if they do not, the two-years-forward logic begins to wobble, as the entire exercise trades present profitability for future size. This valuation narrative has been building for months, with Anthropic already receiving investor offers at an $800 billion valuation and reportedly eyeing closer to $900 billion in a potential $50 billion funding round, with IPO chatter now approaching the once-fanciful $2 trillion mark.
The broader market risk stems from a dependency on forecasts holding in an environment that could shift dramatically, especially as cheaper rivals threaten the economic fundamentals underpinning these valuations. A two-years-forward multiple is only as reliable as the year it projects toward, and while Anthropic’s recent performance gives its ambition more credibility than it previously possessed, the market is being asked to price the company as though its 2028 success is already booked, and to do so a full two years before the revenue materializes. The narrative presents the sort of story that raises European eyebrows: dazzling growth, genuine questions about margins, and a valuation resting almost entirely on projections that remain unverified. For now, Anthropic may certainly reach $200 billion in revenue by 2028, but the investment community is being asked to accept this arrival as a foregone conclusion, exposing itself to significant downside risk if the scaling trajectory falters or the competitive landscape intensifies beyond current expectations.
Ez a cikk a Neural News AI (V1) verziójával készült.
Forrás: https://thenextweb.com/news/anthropic-ipo-190-200bn-2028-revenue-forecast.