AI IPO wave heads for Wall Street: OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX face a pivotal valuation test

The world’s biggest AI companies are gearing up for IPOs that could set the course for the entire sector. According to Forbes, OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX are among the firms preparing to move from private to public markets. For the first time, detailed financials will surface on companies that until now were priced largely on hype and private funding rounds.

These listings could mark a pivotal moment for global AI. Investors will get a look at revenue growth, losses, debt, and the massive infrastructure bills required to build cutting-edge AI models. That’s explored in Forbes.

Today’s AI boom is largely bankrolled by private capital. Forbes reports that OpenAI raised roughly $122 billion in March 2026 at an $852 billion valuation. Rival Anthropic followed in May with a $65 billion round that put its paper valuation at $965 billion.

Elon Musk’s AI venture xAI also played into the capital surge. It was folded into SpaceX earlier this year, giving the combined company an estimated $1.25 trillion valuation, according to Forbes.

In total, investors have already pledged nearly $250 billion in 2026 to just these three AI players.

The scale underscores how extraordinary the current AI market is. Never before has so much capital shifted to a new technology in such a short window.

The IPO filings will expose a crucial point: the true costs behind AI.

Many AI firms aren’t just building software—they’re pouring money into massive physical infrastructure: data centers, chips, energy, and network capacity.

Forbes notes, for example, that a Louisiana data center project was financed with roughly $27 billion in private credit structures by Meta and Blue Owl Capital.

Oracle also issued $18 billion in bonds to help fund investments tied to the Stargate project—an AI initiative with OpenAI and SoftBank that’s estimated at about $500 billion.

Nvidia, according to Forbes, has arranged more than $100 billion in financing and credit structures to support customers buying its AI chips.

These setups push portions of financial risk off traditional balance sheets—making it harder for investors to gauge the full risk profile of AI bets.

The market debut will test whether sky-high valuations hold once investors see the full financial picture.

Forbes reports OpenAI posted an annualized revenue run rate of about $20 billion in 2025—while expecting around $14 billion in losses in 2026.

Translation: OpenAI remains heavily reliant on external capital for now.

Anthropic appears slightly better positioned. Forbes says revenue climbed from roughly $10 billion at the end of 2025 to about $47 billion by May 2026. Its gross margins are reportedly around 70 percent—on par with mature software firms.

Still, uncertainty lingers. Investors want to know how much of that revenue Anthropic actually keeps after cloud providers, partners, and others take their cut.

One striking shift: AI companies are starting to look more like infrastructure operators.

OpenAI previously disclosed compute commitments totaling $1.4 trillion—later reduced to about $600 billion.

Those figures fundamentally reframe the AI story.

While many investors still treat AI as a high-margin software play, the sector increasingly resembles energy, telecom, or infrastructure—industries that demand colossal upfront spend before profits show up.

Expect the filings to reveal not just revenue trajectories, but how much future income is already spoken for to cover existing obligations.

The first major AI IPO will likely set the benchmark for everyone else.

Forbes reports that Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1, 2026—positioning it to go public ahead of OpenAI.

Whatever valuation the market assigns to Anthropic could ripple across OpenAI, SpaceX, and any other AI firm eyeing a listing.

A strong debut could unleash a fresh wave of AI IPOs. A weak one could force a reckoning over the sector’s sky-high private marks.

Private backers have spent years betting on potential. Public markets fixate on profitability, cash flow, and risk.

That makes the upcoming IPOs more consequential than a typical tech listing.

For the first time, investors will decide if they’re willing to pour hundreds of billions into companies that are scaling fast—while burning vast sums to stay ahead.

The outcome may define how the next phase of the global AI race gets financed.