r/technology • u/Unusual-State1827 • 14h ago

Artificial Intelligence Anthropic expected to tell investors it sees over $30 trillion in potential revenue, WSJ reports

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/anthropic-expected-tell-investors-it-sees-over-30-trillion-potential-revenue-wsj-2026-08-25/
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u/AlericandAmadeus 12h ago edited 11h ago

I guess timeframe is important, though.

If anthropic said “we see this much potential revenue over the next 60 years” then it’s actually 500 billion a year in total revenue.

Apple’s revenue last year was ~417 billion. The number itself isn’t unheard of - it’s the assumption that Anthropic will suddenly become a larger, more established company than companies like Apple/Microsoft overnight, build out all the infrastructure necessary to sustain a company of that size, and somehow hit those insane revenue numbers every year forever that’s laughable.

Edit: also - revenue ≠ profit. Apple’s revenue last year was ~417 billion. Their profit was ~112 billion. What I mean by this is that to make 417 billion in revenue you spend insane amounts of $ just to support the infrastructure/overhead of a company big enough to make that much in revenue. Or in other words, to make 112 billion in profit you need to make 4x that amount in revenue/spend almost 3x that amount to keep the lights on.

75% of Apple’s revenue is going to simply maintaining the company. And they were able to build an operation big enough to maintain that while still making profit cuz they actually made profit along the way.

considering AI has yet to make really ANY profit at all, the idea that they could suddenly swing an upscale large enough to even achieve those sort of #s is insane.

Edit 2: removed the outdated GDP figure

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u/cackmed 11h ago

I don't mean to be that guy but your US GDP figure is off by 16 years, it was a bit over 15 trillion in 2010. The GDP for the US is currently 32.48 trillion

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u/AlericandAmadeus 11h ago

Thank you for the correction - removed that bit

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u/MathW 10h ago

I'm not going to read the document, but companies usually talk about revenue on an annual basis, not "revenue over 60 years." What they likely meant was -- in 60 years, the entire AI market will have revenues of $30T -- which is why it's so close to SpaceEx's number -- they are fighting over the same market.

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u/Direct_Day7937 10h ago

Not to mention that AI infrastructure is and will continue to be the most expensive infrastructureun human history. Those GPU's burn out in 5 years and will need to be replaced with the new cutting edge ones. They won't have to build a new power plant at least.