Leading AI companies are moving toward initial public offerings at eye-popping valuations, with Anthropic filing IPO paperwork and other firms weighing public listings to access capital for building and maintaining AI models and pursuing artificial general intelligence. The scale of investment and rapid adoption of AI have helped drive stock market gains.
“These companies are now burning through cash to win the AI race, and public equity is the cheapest source available, particularly in a rising interest rate environment,” said Michael Field, chief equity analyst at Morningstar.
Worries about an AI bubble and concerns over keeping the technology under human control have accompanied the surge in valuations. Some experts fear tech companies and venture capitalists are pouring too much money into a still-nascent technology. Amid that anxiety, several companies have postponed planned offerings: SB Energy, Nscale and Singapore-based DayOne Data Centers have delayed their IPOs at least until December and possibly into next year, according to IPO research firm Renaissance Capital.
AI companies heading for Wall Street
Anthropic, formed in 2021 by former OpenAI leaders and the maker of the Claude chatbot, filed paperwork Monday for an initial stock offering. The company was recently valued at $965 billion and its value is reportedly expected to rise to $1.5 trillion or possibly $2 trillion. In its regulatory filing, Anthropic said it will list on the Nasdaq Global Select Market under the ticker symbol “ANT.”
OpenAI
OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the common good and is now valued at $852 billion. The company had been looking to go public this year, but CEO Sam Altman has said that timeline would be extended amid concerns about AI safety. In an unsuccessful lawsuit against OpenAI and its top executives, Elon Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, claimed the company had strayed from its founding mission in pursuit of greater profits; OpenAI countered that Musk was simply seeking a bigger slice of the company. OpenAI has not yet reported that it has filed initial IPO paperwork with the SEC.
SpaceX and xAI
SpaceX was valued at $800 billion last year, and its value grew to $1.25 trillion after the space exploration company merged in February with Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI. The company went public in June with an offering that raised $86 billion, breaking the record for the largest IPO. Musk arranged for SpaceX to buy xAI earlier this year despite protests from some SpaceX investors, who argued the deal amounted to a bailout and raised ethical concerns because Musk was a controlling shareholder in both companies. Revenue has soared to $14.6 billion, the company reported earlier this month.
Already-public tech heavyweights
Google developed the Gemini AI assistant in response to OpenAI’s ChatGPT; Gemini models are integrated into Google Search and other products such as Maps. The market value of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was $4.54 trillion at the beginning of June, up from $2.3 trillion a year earlier.
Meta’s AI push has included the rollout of its AI agent Muse. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that more than 10 million people in the U.S. and Canada have set up accounts for Muse since the company launched it in August. He noted Muse requires significant computing power to run and said the company expects to improve its cost efficiency by more than 10 times in the next year, “which will enable it to be profitable once the revenue lines are at scale.”
Microsoft, which went public 40 years ago, provided the computing power and financial backing that helped OpenAI build ChatGPT through a multibillion-dollar investment. Microsoft used that technical foundation to power its own AI assistant, Copilot. The once-exclusive partnership has since evolved as both companies have turned to other partners to advance their AI ambitions.
Amid billions — even trillions — at stake, these moves toward public markets underscore both the excitement and the caution surrounding the future of AI.
