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Comment by StopDisinfo910 | Hacker News Reader

Alphabet 2024 revenue: 350 billions dollars Anthropic 2024 revenue: 1 billion dollars

Unreasonable doesn’t even start to capture it. Anthropic being worth 10% of Alphabet is beyond insane.

I thought the same when choosing to invest in Intel rather than NVidia in 2022. At the time, Intel was worth $310B while NVidia was worth $650B, yet Intel's revenue was $80B/year while NVidia's was $25B. I was like "There's no way I'm paying 2x the price for 1/3 the revenue." Now, NVidia is worth $4T (a return of roughly 7x) on revenue of $165B, and Intel is worth $105B (a return of roughly -66%) on revenue of $53B.

Investors are forward looking, and market conditions can change abruptly. If Anthropic actually displaces Google, it's amazingly cheap at 10% of Alphabet's market cap. (Ironically, I even knew that NVidia was displacing Intel at the time I invested, but figured that the magnitude of the transition couldn't possibly be worth the price differential. News flash: companies can go to zero, and be completely replaced by others, and when that happens their market caps just swap.)

Investors are forward looking, except when it's micron in 2000.

Anthropic have several similiar competitors with actual real distribution and tech. Ones that can go 10x are underdogs like Google before IPO or Amazon, or Shopify etc. Anthropic current stock is beyond that. Investors no longer give any big opp. to public. They gain it via private funding

So all it takes is Anthropic 35x-ing their revenue once they start selling ad spots? That sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Right now nobody wants to be the first to offer advertising in LLM services, but LLM conversation history provides a wealth of data for ad targeting. And in more permissive jurisdictions you can have the LLM deliver ads organically in the conversation or just shift the opinions and biases of the model through a short mention in the system message

No, all it takes is Anthropic 35x-ing their revenue while Alphabet revenue somehow stays the same despite Alphabet already having a product perfectly competitive with Anthropic and which can use the same revenue growth strategy.

As I said, insane. And that’s not even considering the 10 to 15% shares of Anthropic actually owned by Alphabet.

__350x-ing__, not 35

Anthropic valuation is 10% of Google. The 35 to get equivalent multiple is correct (well actually closer to 7 as another comment thread rightfully pointed that Anthropic is apparently on track to multiply their revenue by 5 in 2025).

Tech Companies are valued at a multiple of next 12 months revenue, not last 12 months revenue. Since anthropic grew from $1billion to $5billion in revenue in ~8 months, that means it ~10x'ed revenue y/y off of 1 billion base. If you assume even 60% of that growth is retained (low for traditional saas businesses, but who knows), then anthropic is ~10% of google in terms of revenue in mid ~2027.

Basically, 5x-ing revenue in 8 months off of a billion dollars starting revenue is insane. Growing this quickly at this scale breaks every traditional valuation metric.

(And no - this doesn't include margins or COGS).

> The company said its run-rate revenue has increased from around $1 billion at the beginning of 2025, to more than $5 billion in August.

So 10% of valuation for 1.5% of revenue, which grew 5x in last 6 months. Doesn't seem as unrealistic as you put it, if it has good gross margin which some expects to be 60%.

Also Google was valued at $350B when it had $5B revenue.[1]

[1]: https://companiesmarketcap.com/alphabet-google/marketcap/

Valuation includes expected future growth, it's not just present value of future revenue given today's numbers.

You may not agree with the market's estimation of that, but comparing just present revenue isn't really the right comparison.

How old was alphabet in 2024? And anthropic?

How much was google revenue in 2003? It was 1.5 billions (2.6 in today's USD)

Not saying the price is justified, but the comparison is not very fair.

It's just off by a factor of 35?

A rounding error, really.

Someone mentioned their projected ARR for 2025 is 9b. Which makes sense intuitively looking at how much I spent with them this year. So the valuation looks a bit more sane with those numbers.

"Google’s advertising revenue in 2024 was about $264.6 billion"

Somebody above said that Anthropic might reach $9 billion ARR by the end of this year.

Here is another way to look at it: Anthropic is a put option on Google worth 10% of Google price. Expires when they run out of funds.

And that's not even looking at profits vs valuation...

The valuation is not based solely on last year's revenue. Revenue doesn't really matter at this point.

Anthropic competes solely in one of Alphabet multiple markets and that’s a market where Google already has a compelling competitive offer. This valuation gap doesn’t make any sense to me.

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