Key Points
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Anthropic is slated to be the biggest IPO ever.
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In the first half of 2026, its top line grew by 1,300% year over year.
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Anthropic is planning to go public, likely sometime in November. While it hasn’t set a firm date for that event, there is plenty of interest in the stock. After all, Anthropic is one of the two primary AI labs that are private right now (the other being OpenAI).
But the real question is, what will a $10,000 investment on IPO day be worth by 2030? While this is an incredibly difficult projection to make, I think it’s worth considering, as it will determine whether Anthropic is worth investing in on Day 1.
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Anthropic will likely be the biggest IPO ever
Space Exploration Technologies (NASDAQ: SPCX) set the record for the biggest IPO ever earlier this year when it went public with a valuation of about $1.75 trillion. While Anthropic hasn’t yet revealed the precise valuation that it will target for its IPO, it’s widely expected to go public at around $2 trillion. That is a massive figure, and what investors can’t know is how many new shares will be created in that stock offering. That’s an important number, and it can significantly affect the 2030 prediction.
Even with all of the question marks, we can still take a guess at what the company will look like in a few years, and the comparisons are interesting.
Anthropic has generated $16.3 billion in revenue during the first six months of 2026. In the first half of 2025, that figure was $1.2 billion. That’s a blistering 1,300% year-over-year growth rate.
Furthermore, Anthropic has a fantastic gross margin. Its cost of revenue was only $2.38 billion in the first six months of the year, indicating a gross margin of about 85%. That positions it comparably to other software companies in terms of profit potential, but Anthropic’s nowhere near breaking even.
It’s investing billions of dollars into AI computing capacity, and posted a jaw-dropping net loss of nearly $81 billion during the first six months of the year. That’s a huge loss, but considering how much it’s spending to gain access to computing power, it’s not surprising. Furthermore, a large chunk of that loss was due to accounting artifacts.
Anthropic hasn’t publicly offered any targets for profit margins, but I think comparing it to Palantir (NASDAQ: PLTR), a data analytics platform powered by AI, is a smart idea. Palantir’s profit margin is nearly 50%, while its gross profit margin is about 85%.
PLTR Gross Profit Margin data by YCharts.
If Anthropic could achieve similar results and keep up its growth pace, where could it end up?
Large absolute gains, shrinking percentage gains
Predicting how quickly Anthropic will grow over the next few years is difficult. But I wouldn’t be surprised to see its growth rate decelerate significantly — on a percentage basis — after this year. As you’ll note in the speculative chart below, on an absolute dollar basis, the top line is projected to increase in each year by more than it did in the prior one. But as those increases are being measured against a rapidly growing base, the growth percentage shrinks.
| Year |
Growth Rate |
Revenue |
| 2026 |
1,000% |
$50.5 billion |
| 2027 |
300% |
$202 billion |
| 2028 |
150% |
$505 billion |
| 2029 |
75% |
$884 billion |
| 2030 |
50% |
$1.3 trillion |
Data source: Anthropic.
Now, it may seem outlandish to project that Anthropic will be a $1.3 trillion revenue company by 2030, but that’s what the growth rates I’ve postulated above would lead to. It also may not be as far-fetched as it seems. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk believes that his company, which is the developer of the Grok large language models, will see annual recurring revenue of $500 billion to $1 trillion by the end of next year.
Anthropic’s models are far more popular than SpaceX’s, so this $1.3 trillion revenue figure by 2030 may not be out of line.
Should Anthropic rise to that revenue level, reach a 50% profit margin, and be valued at 30 times earnings, it would have a market cap of nearly $20 trillion. If you believe it can do that, then you could comfortably buy it on the IPO date with the expectation of huge gains in the coming years.
However, funding the AI infrastructure build-out that Anthropic will require to support its growth ambitions will not be cheap. As a result, I would expect the company to conduct several additional secondary stock sales along the way, which could dilute existing shareholders significantly. So, one can’t necessarily expect the stock to 10x in a few years.
What will a $10,000 investment made at the IPO price be worth four years from now? I’m guessing that position could be worth up to $50,000 by the time 2030 rolls around if AI growth and adoption keep up. However, if Anthropic’s growth rate is nowhere near as fast as what’s projected above, the stock could fall short of expectations. It’s hard to know so early on, which is why many investors choose to avoid investing in stocks until they have been on the market for a year.
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*Stock Advisor returns as of November 5, 2026.
Keithen Drury has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Palantir Technologies. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
