2026 is already looking to be a special year for the tech industry, as the AI-loving market braces for three major tech IPOs.
Three tech giants, SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, are reportedly eyeing a market debut this year, with the potential debuts being referred to as some of the biggest ever to hit the market.
“There have only been a small number worldwide that have raised more than $20 billion but, but it’s entirely possible that OpenAI or SpaceX would be raising more than that,” University of Florida emeritus professor and IPO expert Jay Ritter told Gizmodo.
SpaceX is allegedly eyeing a market debut as early as June, and according to some reports, is expecting to raise more than $30 billion. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk confirmed IPO preparations in an X post last month, saying that Ars Technica’s reporting was “accurate.”
Despite being a space company, there is seemingly an AI angle to this IPO as well. The Ars Technica article that Musk confirmed on X posited that SpaceX was eyeing an IPO to raise enough capital to deploy data centers in space, an absurdly ambitious pitch that has been gaining considerable steam in the tech world.
OpenAI and Anthropic’s potential public offerings, on the other hand, are on less certain timelines. A Financial Times report from December said that the Claude-maker had hired the law firm Wilson Sonsini to prepare for an IPO as early as this year, but Anthropic’s chief communications officer said there were no immediate plans.
Meanwhile, a Reuters report from November said that OpenAI was planning an IPO of up to $1 trillion as early as late 2026. The report came mere days after the AI giant completed its recapitalization process to go from a non-profit to a for-profit. A valuation of that level would make OpenAI one of the most valuable publicly traded firms from the get-go.
Although company executives have rejected the reported timeline, Altman did say in October that going public was “the most likely path” for OpenAI, “given the capital needs that we’ll have, and sort of, the size of the company.”
If the reports are true, not only will these IPOs cause an already tech-driven market to level up in its frenzy, they could, at least temporarily, give the overall economy a bump.
“A buoyant IPO market historically has benefited local economies, especially those where employees have a lot of equity-based compensation, but the general economy as well,” Ritter said. “And there’s been a number of articles written recently about the increasing stock market valuations and how this had a wealth effect on the US economy that probably offset some of the negative effects of the Trump tariffs.”
Tech, and especially AI, have become quite central to the American economy. So much so that, in a note from earlier this year, Deutsche Bank researchers said that the AI sector might single-handedly be saving the entire U.S. economy.
“In the absence of tech-related spending, the U.S. would be close to, or in, recession this year,” Deutsche Bank’s George Saravelos wrote.
Considering AI’s oversized impact on the economy, the “IPOs could certainly have an effect on the broader economy, depending on how they do,” Ritter said.
Plans can still change; in fact, the economic uncertainty that followed Trump’s tariff plans deterred expected IPO activity in 2025. But SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic are practically household names at this point, Renaissance Capital Vice President of Research Nick Einhorn told Gizmodo, and could probably rely on investor interest regardless of how the market is performing.
The AI “bubble” of it all
With both Anthropic and OpenAI potentially eyeing an IPO, the market may finally get what it has been asking for: a major pure-play AI stock.
Although most, if not all, of the big tech stocks have received significant boosts to their valuation thanks to the AI hype, practically none of them deal exclusively in AI. Amazon has its retail operations, Meta has its social media empire, Alphabet has the Google search engine, Apple has iPhones, and even the market’s AI darling, Nvidia’s chips, aren’t used solely in artificial intelligence.
The rare IPOs that are deemed AI pure-plays, like CoreWeave from earlier this year, are considered to be a prized look into the future of AI demand growth.
If OpenAI and Anthropic debut, 2026 could be the year the market starts to make up its mind about AI. Both AI giants would begin to share a whole lot of financial information with the public, all of which could be used to figure out what exactly they believe is the road to profitability, where demand is going, and whether or not there could indeed be a bubble.
“The AI space in general, it’s pretty new,” Einhorn said. “As you get more AI stocks in the marketplace, then we’ll probably get more consensus over time of what the right metrics are to focus on and so on. But I think we’re still in the early stages of that.”
Even then, though, there is a very real risk of overvaluation. Both companies are really big names that carry a lot of hype and have already amassed an intense amount of retail investor interest without any detailed financial disclosures in sight.
How the IPOs will ultimately be received by the overall market will determine whether AI investment will continue its meteoric rise, or perhaps be the first domino to fall on the road to a feared AI bubble burst.
“I think that, if the IPOs go well, that will certainly encourage more investment in AI by private companies [and] by large public companies that are maybe not AI-specific companies,” Einhorn said. “And if these IPOs do poorly, it could cause investors and CTOs and CIOs and CFOs to, you know, pull back a little bit on AI investment.”
If it turns out that AI is a bubble that is poised to burst, the economy could tank, and many companies risk being reduced to shreds, but not the top few. Even in the dot-com bubble burst, “most of the companies crashed and burned,” Ritter said, but there were still “a couple of real big successes” like Nvidia, which went public in 1999 in the height of the dot-com boom and not only did it survive the burst, it went on to become the first company to hit $5 trillion market cap in late 2025.
Source: gizmodo.com
