As Anthropic prepares for a landmark initial public offering, Wall Street is looking unusually far into the future to value the artificial intelligence startup. Bankers and institutional investors are calculating the company’s enterprise value based on projected 2028 revenues of $190 billion to $200 billion. By anchoring valuation models to metrics two years out, underwriters are attempting to price a business expanding at unprecedented speed while spending heavily to build out its underlying AI infrastructure.
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Valuing a high-growth tech company on long-dated revenue forecasts is uncommon, but Anthropic’s financial trajectory provides the rationale. The firm’s revenue run rate surged from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025 to more than $47 billion by May 2026, driven by a pace of annual ten-fold growth over the past three years. For the second quarter of 2026, Anthropic projects at least $10.9 billion in revenue, more than double the previous quarter, setting the stage for its first quarterly operating profit of $559 million.
Wall Street is utilizing forward revenue multiples rather than traditional earnings or EBITDA metrics, which remain compressed by massive investments in compute capacity, GPU acquisition, model training, and talent acquisition. Proponents argue that as technology matures and inference efficiency improves, fixed operating and infrastructure costs will shrink as a percentage of overall revenue, unlocking substantial margin expansion over time.
To establish appropriate multiples, advisers are evaluating public market peers with comparable growth profiles. Palantir serves as a primary benchmark for high-growth AI exposure, currently trading at roughly 53 times expected 2026 revenue. Meanwhile, Cloudflare and SpaceX, both trading at around 41.6 times expected 2026 revenue, provide reference points for high-growth software infrastructure and long-horizon capital scaling, respectively.
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While evaluating a company on revenue expectations two or three years out is rare, recent market precedents exist. Backers of Cerebras Systems cited 2028 revenue projections ahead of its IPO, and SpaceX relied on forecasts extending to 2029 prior to its public listing in June.
Despite enthusiasm for Anthropic’s surging top-line growth, institutional investors remain wary of the enormous capital expenditures required to maintain AI market leadership. Heavy spending on computing infrastructure has driven pullbacks across the broader tech sector in recent months. The central question for potential shareholders is whether Anthropic can convert its rapid revenue expansion into durable long-term productivity and free cash flow, or whether rising infrastructure overhead will ultimately temper its long-term valuation ceiling.
