Artificial Intelligence powerhouses SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are currently locked in a race to list publicly, with the three companies planning their Initial Public Offerings (IPOs) later in 2026.
Here are key things to note as the IPO race heats up as explained by Kyle Reidhead, co-owner and Head of Research at Milk Road,.
Anthropic IPO and Enterprise Software
There has been a big sell-off in software because everyone thought that what you can do with Claude and OpenAI is going to replace all the software that we have.
The market is now rebounding in software because it is realising how hard it is to rebuild all the SaaS products we use every day in our companies. Maybe it is better to have specialized companies that build the software for you.
“We have been spending all this money on tokens for AI, and a lot of companies are realizing they did not actually build anything from all of it, so for some it is more of a waste than anything.
“Some companies are obviously building amazing things, and it is working really well, and some are realizing they are just wasting money, so the market is still trying to figure this out.” Kyle Reidhead notes.
SpaceX and Data Centers
SpaceX is becoming the energy and AI infrastructure company of the new age. Right now, data centers are been built on Earth, which feeds into what Elon Musk is best at in the world – building data centers.
SpaceX have their Teraflop coming with SpaceX, so they are also going to start to build chips, and they are going to look into been able to put those data centers up in space.
Building Data centers in space is way more efficient and way cheaper than building them on Earth and there are no regulatory concerns and political issues. The world needs more compute, more energy, and more data centers, and the problem is that on Earth, it is hard to do it.
The end result for SpaceX is to build more data centers in space to make things way more efficient,
2026 IPO Outlook
-
It is healthy. We are about to have the three biggest IPOs in history, all within probably three to five months. You are going to have SpaceX at around $2 trillion, and OpenAI and Anthropic both probably above a trillion.
-
We have never had an IPO around a trillion before, and we are going to have three of them all within a few months, so it is incredible. As long as you are in the AI space, the opportunity to IPO is huge, and that is why we are seeing it.
-
If you are in the AI infrastructure space, or AI in general, or even frontier technology like space and robotics, now is definitely the time to carry out IPOs. We are in a raging global bull market on that side of the world. If you are in other industries, you are delaying, because unfortunately capital is getting completely sucked out of that market and moving into AI.
Advice for New Investors on IPOs
-
SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are all going to be important and incredible companies. Generally, the investors of these three companies are sitting on an insane amount of profit and they have not had a lot of liquidity events, so they are going to be taking profits.
-
What you are going to end up with is these companies IPO, and then retail is probably going to bid them up because the funds that bought the stuff privately cannot actually take profits on it just yet. I would imagine they actually perform quite well, as long as something crazy does not escalate over in the Middle East. But three to six months down the road you are going to start to see these things lag, so I would be unsure about being a long-term holder on these. I am actually thinking about buying some of them, particularly SpaceX.
