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.

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 by existing customers. More than half of its $100,000-plus customers now use both the Claude platform and a first-party app such as Claude Code or Cowork, according to its IPO filing.

Anthropic reported $16.95 billion in third-quarter revenue, up 1,127% from a year earlier, in its Nov. 2 amended IPO filing. It has applied to list on Nasdaq under the proposed ticker ANT, bringing the fast-growing AI business closer to public-market investors.

The $2 Trillion Question

Anthropic's growth invites a much bigger question: Could it eventually command a valuation approaching $2 trillion? That would put it in the territory of the world's largest public companies, including Nvidia. Its rapid gross-profit expansion and enterprise adoption make the comparison worth considering, but reaching that scale would require sustaining growth while converting demand into durable cash generation.

The compute bill remains a major hurdle. Anthropic's business depends on enormous investments in chips, data centers and cloud capacity. Its infrastructure commitments could absorb substantial cash even as revenue and gross margins expand.

Anthropic's five-year sprint shows how quickly AI demand can create a major business. The $2 trillion question is whether it can turn that growth into the scale, profitability and cash flow required to join the market's most valuable companies.