Anthropic Did in 5 Years What Took Nvidia 31—And It Raises a $2 Trillion Question

Anthropic ANT has reached a level of annual gross profit that took Nvidia Corp NVDA more than three decades to achieve — and it has done so in just five years. The comparison captures the extraordinary speed of the AI startup’s rise.

But investors weighing its coming IPO will need to look beyond the headline number to understand what is powering the growth — and whether the economics can support a valuation that puts it in the same league as the biggest companies in the market.

Anthropic: A Five-Year Run to $40 Billion

Fiscal.ai’s Nov. 1 analysis found that 79 companies currently generate more than $40 billion in annual gross profit. Outside Meta Platforms, Inc. META and Alphabet Inc. GOOGL GOOG, every company on its list took at least 20 years to reach that threshold. Nvidia needed 31 years, while Microsoft Corp MSFT and Apple Inc. AAPL each took more than three decades. Anthropic, founded in 2021, got there in five.

This is annualized gross profit, not cumulative profit or net income. Fiscal.ai attributes the margin expansion to fixed per-token pricing and lower processing costs as hardware use and inference become more efficient. Gross margin moved from below zero to above 80% in less than two years, it said.

Enterprise Demand Is the Engine

Anthropic had more than 11,900 customers spending at least $100,000 annually as of Sept. 30, including more than 1,900 spending over $1 million. Net revenue retention reached approximately 900%, reflecting sharply higher spending…