Key Takeaways
- SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel said on the Big Technology Podcast that Anthropic could become the first company valued at $10 trillion.
- Patel puts Anthropic’s inference gross margins at about 75%, in line with Salesforce. He says its customer acquisition cost is close to zero and that it is now profitable on revenue minus compute.
- Anthropic’s leaked S-1 still shows a 2025 operating loss of about $8 billion, and Patel himself says the stock “could be zero.”
- Amazon trades at 28.6x forward earnings, near the bottom of its five-year range, even though it is both an Anthropic investor and one of its biggest compute suppliers.
The bear case on Anthropic’s IPO is loud right now.
On Wednesday, Michael Burry went to X to count how many profitable S&P 500 companies Anthropic’s private valuation could buy. His answer: “The number that Anthropic’s valuation buys is 78.” Last week, TIKR covered a billionaire investor’s call for a 50% haircut to the IPO price.
But one of the sharpest analysts in AI sees a much higher ceiling. On Wednesday’s episode of the Big Technology Podcast, SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel said:
“Anthropic could even be the first company to be a $10 trillion valuation company in the world.”
That’s 5x the roughly $2 trillion he expects at the IPO: about 20x the $100 billion in revenue he says Anthropic is at.
If he’s even partly right, two companies are set up for a very good decade: Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet (GOOG).
Better than software?
Patel’s case starts with margins.
He pointed to Salesforce (CRM), “probably like one of the greatest SaaS companies out there,” and said its “gross margins are like 75% and Anthropic on their inference is doing 75% gross margins, a little bit higher even.” By his telling, Anthropic got there much faster than Salesforce did.
Then there’s sales. Patel noted that a software company’s customer acquisition cost “can be as high as like 30%.” Meanwhile, “Anthropic has near no customer acquisition cost.”
Add his read that “Anthropic is now profitable in terms of compute cost minus revenue, or revenue minus compute cost, both training and inference combined,” and you get to his punchline:
“So it’s arguably a better business than software is an AI lab.”
That’s quite the claim about a company the bears are calling a bubble.
What $10 trillion takes
Patel expects Anthropic’s revenue multiple to come down quite a bit, so the growth has to come from revenue. He said Anthropic “would need to be at a trillion dollars of revenue or something crazy like that, which could happen at some point in 28 or 29.”
For perspective, analysts expect all of Amazon to bring in about $1.1 trillion of revenue in fiscal 2028…
…so Anthropic would need to go from Patel’s $100 billion to an Amazon-sized top line in about three years. That’s 10x.
Crazy? Maybe. But Patel also noted that revenue at the AI labs “just went up 10x year-on-year.”
Isn’t this the company that lost $8 billion?
Of course, the bears have numbers too. Anthropic’s leaked S-1, first reported by Reuters, reportedly shows a 2025 operating loss of $8.1 billion on $4.6 billion of revenue. That’s with model training and stock compensation included. Patel’s own post on the IPO allowed that “it could be zero.”
Here’s the thing: that loss is last year’s. Patel’s point is that “AI revenue for today is really based on the infrastructure you spent in prior years.” The S-1 reportedly already shows the turn, with positive adjusted operating income in the second quarter of 2026 (adjusted, so stock compensation is left out).
The real risk is solvency. Patel himself flagged that the AI labs renting Amazon’s infrastructure “could go insolvent.”
Cue the payday
Amazon and Alphabet win on this twice.
First, as owners. On last Friday’s episode, Big Technology’s Alex Kantrowitz noted that Alphabet is an Anthropic shareholder and that Amazon has “a big investment in Anthropic.” Current estimates put Amazon at roughly 15%, and Alphabet at a similar amount, at 15%. At $10 trillion, every 1% of Anthropic is worth $100 billion. (At a $2 trillion IPO, it’s $20 billion.)
The other payday comes from selling Anthropic the compute. Kantrowitz says Anthropic has committed $111 billion to Alphabet over the next decade and $110 billion to Amazon, so each could be booking roughly $11 billion a year from it if the spending is spread evenly. All of that lands on top of the growth analysts already expect at Alphabet, where revenue is projected to climb from $403 billion in fiscal 2025 to around $733 billion in 2028…
Patel added that Amazon’s AI infrastructure investments “are profitable today.”
Yet the market isn’t paying much for any of this. Amazon trades at 28.6x forward earnings, not far above its five-year low of 25.7x…
(Over those five years, it’s averaged 49.0x, and it hit 91.5x(!) in November 2021.)
So is Anthropic really headed for $10 trillion?
I don’t think Anthropic needs anything close to a $10 trillion valuation to make Amazon and Alphabet shareholders happy. At the IPO price Patel expects, their stakes are already worth a fortune. And the compute commitments become cloud revenue regardless of where Anthropic’s stock trades, as long as the company stays solvent. Amazon’s multiple doesn’t seem to price in that payday today.
Of course, the full S-1 will show how much stock compensation eats into that adjusted profit. And the IPO itself will tell us how much of Patel’s story the market is willing to believe.
So what is Amazon stock actually worth?
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Disclaimer:
Please note that the articles on TIKR are not intended to serve as investment or financial advice from TIKR or our content team, nor are they recommendations to buy or sell any stocks. We create our content based on TIKR Terminal’s investment data and analysts’ estimates. Our analysis might not include recent company news or important updates. TIKR has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. Thank you for reading, and happy investing!
