Anthropic’s IPO valuation is being built on $190bn revenue expectations

Anthropic’s prospective IPO valuation is being shaped by revenue expectations extending to 2028, according to Reuters, as investors attempt to price one of the fastest-growing companies in the AI market.

Reuters reported that Anthropic is projecting roughly £140.4 million ($190 billion) to £147.8 billion ($200 billion) in revenue for 2028, based on information from people familiar with the company’s financials. That compares with the £34.7 billion ($47 billion) revenue run rate Anthropic disclosed in May, illustrating the scale of growth investors are being asked to underwrite.

Investors Are Looking Beyond Traditional IPO Valuation

Reuters reported that using revenue multiples is common for high-growth software businesses that have yet to establish a mature profit profile.

What is less typical is the horizon being used here.

According to the report, investors are looking out to 2028 because Anthropic’s growth rate and infrastructure spending make conventional benchmarks harder to apply. Public companies including Cloudflare, Palantir and SpaceX are reportedly being considered as reference points ahead of Anthropic’s analyst day.

The comparison shows the difficulty of valuing frontier AI companies using established software metrics alone. Anthropic is growing rapidly, but its economics are also being shaped by significant spending on compute, model training, inference and hiring.

Series H Showed the Scale Anthropic Had Already Reached

Anthropic’s financing announcement in May gave a clearer view of the company’s current scale.

The company raised £48 billion ($65 billion) in Series H funding at a £713.3 billion ($965 billion) post-money valuation, led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, and Sequoia Capital. It also said its revenue run rate had crossed £34.7 billion ($47 billion) earlier that month.

Anthropic said the funding would be used to advance safety and interpretability research, expand compute to meet demand for Claude, and scale its products and partnerships.

“This funding will help us serve the historic demand we are experiencing, stay at the research frontier, and bring Claude to more of the places where work happens,” said Krishna Rao, Chief Financial Officer at Anthropic.

Anthropic had also expanded its compute commitments ahead of the funding round. In April, the company announced an agreement with Amazon for up to 5GW of capacity for training and deploying Claude, alongside a separate agreement with Google and Broadcom for 5GW of next-generation TPU capacity. Anthropic also said it had secured access to GPU capacity through SpaceX’s Colossus 1 and Colossus 2.

Compute Remains Central to the Valuation Debate

The infrastructure commitments help explain why future margins matter so much to Anthropic’s valuation.

Reuters reported that Anthropic continues to spend heavily on GPUs and other computing capacity, as well as model training, inference, and hiring. Investors are therefore making a judgement about whether revenue will eventually grow faster than the costs required to support that expansion.

That makes the 2028 forecast more than a growth projection.

If Anthropic reaches anything close to the revenue range Reuters reported, its current infrastructure spending could represent a smaller proportion of the business over time. If growth slows or compute costs remain structurally high, the assumptions behind a much larger valuation become harder to sustain.

The crux of the question now becomes whether the business can scale far enough for the cost of frontier AI to become less dominant in the overall model, rather than how quickly Anthropic can grow.

Anthropic Has Become a Test Case for IPO Valuation

Reuters reported that Anthropic’s revenue run rate rose from about £6.6 billion ($9 billion) at the end of 2025 to more than £34.7 billion ($47 billion) by May 2026, while the company had projected at least £8 billion ($10.9 billion) of revenue for the second quarter.

That pace explains why investors are willing to look further ahead than usual.

It also makes Anthropic a useful test case for the wider AI market. Frontier model companies require enormous upfront investment in compute, infrastructure, and research, while much of their valuation depends on expectations about how quickly enterprise adoption will translate into sustainable revenue and margin growth.

Anthropic’s prospective IPO is therefore being priced on the business it could become by 2028, not only on the company it is today.

That makes the listing a useful measure of how far public markets are prepared to extend their valuation horizon when pricing the economics of frontier AI.

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