SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are all preparing initial public offerings, competing for investor cash that could determine who ends up the winner of the artificial intelligence era.
The three companies “could make 2026 the biggest year for U.S. IPOs,” said the Financial Times. The competition has been “sharpened” by familiarity: SpaceX chief Elon Musk departed OpenAI in 2018 (and recently lost a lawsuit against the ChatGPT parent) followed by Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in 2020. Now the AI rivals are positioning themselves to “command the deepest pool of capital.” All are hoping to “ride a wave of AI enthusiasm” among investors, but stock markets may be less enamored of the AI sector’s “vast cash burn” than private backers have been.
There is still enthusiasm. The artificial intelligence giants are “well run, high-growth businesses,” said Rob Hilmer, the founder of Goanna Capital, to the Financial Times.
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The success of the IPOs depends on if the AI startups “can keep growing at the ridiculous rates they’ve achieved so far,” Parmy Olson said at Bloomberg. OpenAI says it will bring in $280 billion in revenues by 2030, up from about $25 billion now. To achieve that goal, the company’s corporate customers “must plug its technology into a broader array” of uses including “sales, finance, healthcare, human resources, logistics” and more. But many potential business clients are “keeping generative AI at bay” amid questions about whether it is “reliable enough for use in high-stakes decision-making.” Claude and ChatGPT will eventually be worked into corporate workflows. “The issue is how long that might take.”
A critical question: “How bad is the burn?” Beatrice Nolan said at Fortune. OpenAI’s need for “data centers, chips and cloud capacity” requires it to spend a lot of money, and its IPO filing will help investors determine if the company can turn a profit sooner than later. The answer “will matter to the whole AI industry.” If investors are willing to subsidize a “company spending at this scale” that will suggest the market “still has tolerance for AI’s cash bonfire.” If not, life could become “more complicated for the next wave of AI listings.”
What next?
Investors are enthusiastic about AI but some experts warn the “novel technology comes with new risks,” said The Wall Street Journal. The sector has great potential but the markets have “not factored in the cost of the vulnerabilities these systems could create,” Navrina Singh, the CEO of Credo AI, said to the outlet. That makes for an unsettled market. “Everything is evolving so quickly,” said Jeffrey Bernardo, the CEO of Augustine Asset Management.
The IPOs could be derailed by “abundant and cheap” artificial intelligence available from Chinese labs like DeepSeek, said CNBC. There is also a “wave of Western challengers” such as Nvidia, Cohere, Reflection and Mistral that are “building cheaper, smaller, more efficient alternatives” than Anthropic and OpenAI. By the time their IPOs come to fruition, the “central premise of their valuations may already be gone.”
