A wave of mega initial public offerings led by Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX is reshaping public markets as record valuations and a stable trading environment pull companies off the sidelines after a multiyear drought. 

“This year to date has been the busiest for IPOs since 2021,” Mark Schwartz, IPO and special purpose acquisition company advisory leader at consultancy EY, told FinAi News.  

In the first quarter of 2021, companies globally raised $202 billion from IPOs, compared to $41 billion during the first quarter of 2026, according to an April report from EY.

The benefits of going public — growth capital, liquidity, branding, acquisition currency — “have never disappeared,” Schwartz said, but only recently have they coincided with “record stock market valuations [and] a stable market environment.” 

As these huge AI companies head to the public markets, economists and industry leaders are paying attention to a myriad of data points to evaluate the offerings. 

ALSO READ: OpenAI files for IPO, one week after Anthropic 

The valuation  

As Wall Street becomes deeply involved with AI, either by using it or financing its buildout, valuations of these companies have skyrocketed, becoming completely detached from the reality of their balance sheets, Matt Sekerke, a fellow at the Institute for Applied Economics at Johns Hopkins University and a visiting fellow at Durham University’s business school, told FinAi News. 

OpenAI has said it won’t be profitable until 2030, Sekerke said. The timeline hinges on everything going exactly as planned, which is rarely the case in markets, he added. 

“Investors are paying for earnings that are going to materialize as far into the future as if they were being earned today,” Sekerke said.  

Anthropic is valued at $965 billion after its series H funding round in March and is eyeing a valuation of more than $1 trillion for its IPO, according to Crunchbase. 

The company’s revenue is expected to be close to $40 billion for 2026, according to reporting from news publication The Information. 

Retail giant Walmart posted revenue of $681 billion for fiscal 2025 and is valued at $946 billion, while tech giant Apple posted revenue of $391 trillion for FY 25 and is valued at $4.2 trillion. 

Anthropic has never made money, Sekerke said.  

“They may in this quarter show a profit … because they’re getting a discount on their compute from SpaceX … which is going to artificially lower their expenses just for this quarter.  

“And on the back of that, they may be able to say they’re profitable or cash flow positive,” he said. 

EY’s Schwartz argues that “as we move forward in this cycle, we expect to see more deals — particularly in technology and related sectors — to [be] priced based on expected forward performance multiple years in the future given forecasts of outsized addressable markets and disruptive potential.” 

AI digital creative studio Figma went public in July 2025 at $33 per share and now is trading at about $19 a share, losing nearly 40% market cap. Meanwhile, AI compute provider Coreweave, backed by Nvidia, had its IPO in March 2025 at $40 per share and is trading at $97, a gain of over 100%. 

Too big to fail 

In March, Nasdaq, the maker of the Nasdaq100 index, changed its rules, which will fast-track companies into the benchmark.  

Previously, companies had to be publicly traded for at least three months to be included in the index; the updated rule is 15 days. 

S&P Global kept its S&P 500 inclusion rules unchanged, meaning Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX will need to be profitable and publicly traded for at least one year before they can be added to the index.  

Rules for both the Nasdaq-100 and the Russell indexes also have been updated to allow for large IPOs to be added sooner after listing. 

“There are a number of investors who are obligated to own [an index fund], like people who issue ETFs, mutual funds, pension funds and retirement funds [401K],” Sekerke said, adding that these investments must be made even if the fund managers don’t want them. 

Hedge funds and large institutional investors — including JPMorgan, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Citi — will continue to come to the IPO table.  

With that backing, the newly public companies “will essentially become too big to fail,” Axel Rebien, chief executive of fintech Serrala, told FinAi News. 

Over-promising, under-delivering 

Despite concerns around companies’ valuations and lack of profitability, economists are pointing to another hurdle in the AI economy — the commoditization of tech. 

“There is little reason to believe that AI services will ever be a profit center for any company because it’s essentially a commodity product,” Sekerke said. “Anybody who owns enough compute can do essentially what any of these AI companies do by predicting text from a corpus of text that’s available on the internet.” 

Cost of AI 

Post commoditization, it is difficult to find the return on investment for companies using AI, Sekerke said.  

Other industry leaders investment firm CEO Ken Griffin have echoed the sentiment of Uber Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald, who said on the May 23 edition of the “Rapid Response” podcast that his company is finding it difficult to justify rising AI costs that aren’t yielding returns. 

But other FIs argue that AI is allowing them to grow operations with the same headcount while being more efficient, according to FinAi News’ prior reporting.  

The cost of AI also is expected to rise substantially, Sekerke said. 

“Right now, they’re affordable because AI providers are losing money on every customer,” Sekerke said. “The public hasn’t seen an AI product that is priced sufficiently high for the creators of that product to recover their costs.” 

Many companies reportedly have struggled to justify token costs they incur from using AI models, according to FinAi News’ prior reporting. 

Flurry of potential IPOs 

While many questions around the efficacy of AI and its impact on the general economy exist, many industry leaders are looking at the IPO with excitment. 

“It’s a very good thing that you’re seeing these IPOs actually occur, because for a really long time you saw that companies wanted to stay private for a lot longer, or they never wanted to go public,” Tomas Campos, chief executive of AI credit data and analytics company Spinwheel, said. 

According to F-Prime Capital‘s Fintech Index data, fintech VC exit value from IPOs dropped from $222.4 billion in 2021 to $29.1 billion by 2024 — a drought driven by high interest rates and a public market reset in valuations, Abdul Abdirahman, a principal at the Cambridge, Mass.-based venture capital firm, previously told FinAi News. 

In 2025, 16 companies went public compared to a record 77 in 2021, according to the F-Prime report. 

“Operating as a public company is not easy as there’s a lot more overhead that’s required,” Campos said, adding that many profitable companies, such as Stripe, have chosen not to go public. 

Companies that are profitable in private markets usually avoid going public because of the additional overhead costs and extensive public scrutiny, he said, adding that some unprofitable companies usually need additional funding to their path of profitability. 

If Anthropic, OpenAI and SpaceX IPOs are successful, it will spark many private companies to go public as well, Campos said. 

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