In multiple Whatsapp groups, which I am a part of, I saw people taking about a headline circulating recently. Anthropic — the company behind Claude — filed confidentially for an IPO at a near-trillion-dollar valuation. A few days before that, OpenAI had been valued at $852 billion in its last funding round. The commentary that followed was immediate and predictable: either one of these AI startups, alone, would be worth more than the entire Indian IT industry.

I read that. And I understood why it spread. It’s the kind of number that makes your jaw drop on the first read.

But I’ve spent enough time looking at business fundamentals to know that first reads are rarely the whole story. So I went back to the actual numbers. And what I found was more interesting than the headline — not because the gap is smaller, but because the comparison itself is partially broken. And once you fix it, you end up with a completely different question: not why are Indian IT companies worth so little, but what exactly are investors paying $1 trillion for?

The Headline Comparison Is Comparing the Wrong Things

Here’s the specific mistake every viral post is making. When someone says ‘Indian IT is worth $280 billion,’ they are talking about annual revenue — the actual money flowing into the industry every year. When someone says ‘OpenAI is worth $1 trillion,’ they are talking about market capitalisation — a forward-looking bet on what the company might be worth across its entire future lifetime.

These are not the same thing. Comparing them is like saying your salary is lower than your neighbour’s net worth.

Fix the comparison on a like-for-like basis and the picture changes materially:

Market cap vs market cap: The combined public market capitalisation of India’s listed IT sector — TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCL, and the rest — sits at approximately $450 billion. OpenAI at $852 billion and Anthropic at $965 billion still dwarf that. But now we’re comparing a market-valued industry to a market-valued company. And the gap, while real, is 2x, not 4x.

Revenue vs revenue: Flip to actual cash generated and the picture reverses entirely. The Indian IT-BPM sector produces roughly $280 billion in hard, realised revenue every year. OpenAI and Anthropic, combined, are running at an annualised revenue rate of approximately $65–70 billion. India’s IT industry generates nearly 4–5x more real revenue than both AI giants put together.

So the scary headline is technically accurate and practically misleading at the same time.

Then Why the Astonishing Multiples?

This is the question that actually matters. If Anthropic pulls in maybe $47 billion in annualized revenue and is valued at $965 billion, that’s roughly a 20x revenue multiple. OpenAI — with around $20 billion in 2025 revenues — is valued at $852 billion, implying a 40–45x multiple.

Meanwhile, Infosys trades at around 4–5x revenue. TCS is in similar territory. The entire Indian IT sector, despite generating hundreds of billions in actual profit-generating, dividend-paying cash flows, commands a 2–3x revenue multiple.

Why the gap? Three reasons, and they all matter.

The scaling model is completely different. Indian IT scales on people. To grow revenue by $1 billion, you typically need to hire thousands more engineers. That math caps how fast the business can grow, and markets know it. Infosys employs over 320,000 people. Anthropic employs approximately 2,500. AI companies scale on compute and code — not headcount. One new enterprise customer at $1 million ARR doesn’t require hiring 50 people.

The margin trajectory is what investors are actually buying. Anthropic’s gross margins on inference have jumped from 38% to over 70% in roughly a year. They’re about to post their first operating profit — a projected $559 million in Q2 2026. That’s a thin margin on a near-trillion-dollar valuation today. But if the trajectory holds, investors are buying a business that could reach software-level economics at massive scale. Indian IT, on the other hand, has been operating at stable 20–25% operating margins for years. Predictable. Reliable. Not parabolic.

The ‘infrastructure of the future’ premium. Investors aren’t just valuing what OpenAI and Anthropic earn today. They’re pricing in the possibility that these two companies will become the foundational layer of global computing for the next two decades — the way AWS, Microsoft Azure, or the internet itself became infrastructure. That kind of optionality commands a premium no spreadsheet can fully justify.

I’ve watched enough business cycles to know: the gap between what you’re worth and what you claim to be worth eventually closes. The question is in which direction.

The numbers in this piece are based on publicly available data as of June 2026. Anthropic’s IPO filing figures, OpenAI valuation rounds, and Indian IT sector figures sourced from CNBC, The Statesman, and publicly available annual reports.