SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic lead record-breaking wave of mega-IPOs in 2026

Wall Street is bracing for the biggest technology debut season in nearly a decade. SpaceX filed its initial public offering prospectus last week, signaling the start of what market analysts are already calling the era of the "mega-IPO." The aerospace company is seeking to raise $75 billion, a sum that would value it at $1.75 trillion—a threshold no company has ever crossed on its first day of trading. If the numbers hold, SpaceX would shatter the record set by Saudi Aramco's 2019 debut, which raised $26 billion and remains the largest IPO in history.

But SpaceX is not alone. OpenAI and Anthropic, the two most prominent artificial intelligence laboratories in the world, are racing to follow. According to reporting from major U.S. newspapers, both companies are preparing to file their own IPO documentation within weeks. OpenAI, which operates ChatGPT and recently reached a private valuation of $852 billion, is expected to become a publicly traded company by September. Anthropic, the creator of the Claude chatbot, is aiming for an autumn listing and is also expected to cross the $1 trillion valuation threshold. The three companies compete fiercely in their respective markets—space exploration and AI development—and their CEOs have publicly clashed, yet they are moving in lockstep toward the public markets.

The scale of what is coming is staggering. Kyle Stanford, a venture capital research director at PitchBook, notes that if these three companies complete their IPOs in 2026, they would represent the largest venture-backed technology offerings ever launched in the United States. But the mega-IPO wave extends far beyond this trio. Approximately 12 major companies are expected to go public this year with a combined value near $3.1 trillion. About seven of those are directly or closely tied to artificial intelligence. The list includes Databricks, a data and AI platform valued at $130 to $134 billion; Stripe, the payments processor; ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok; and Anduril, a defense technology firm. Smaller but still significant players like Strava, the fitness app used by more than 180 million people across 185 countries, and Oura, a Finnish company that makes health-tracking smart rings, have also filed confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Three factors are driving this unprecedented mobilization of capital. The most visible is artificial intelligence itself. The infrastructure demands alone—the computational power required to train and run modern AI systems—are measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars. Only the public capital markets can absorb that scale of funding. But AI is not the whole story. The macroeconomic environment has shifted. After years of rising interest rates that dampened investor appetite for new stock offerings, the Federal Reserve has begun to ease monetary policy. The last major technology IPO was Uber in 2019, which raised $8.1 billion on its first day. That seven-year drought created a structural problem: many companies that grew to enormous size in the private markets now need liquidity for their employees, founders, and venture investors. A public listing is the only way to unlock that value at scale. Finally, there is pure momentum. Renos Savvides, the head of capital markets at Neuberger Berman, describes it plainly: "Everybody wants in. There is a fear of missing out that will perhaps lead to an unnaturally high level of interest." These are generational companies that do not appear often, and investors want them in their portfolios.

The appetite was on display in May when Cerebras Systems, a semiconductor company that competes with Nvidia in AI chips, went public on the Nasdaq. The offering was oversubscribed more than 20 times. Cerebras priced its shares at $185 each and raised $5.55 billion, closing its first day with a market value of $95 billion—nearly matching Meta's opening-day valuation in 2012. Yet the stock fell 10 percent the next day, a reminder that these debuts are volatile and that investor enthusiasm can evaporate quickly. João Queiroz, head of trading at Banco Carregosa, calls Cerebras a "stress test" for what comes next. The market clearly has appetite for AI infrastructure plays, but SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic operate at a different scale and will face far more scrutiny.

That scrutiny is warranted. OpenAI is not profitable and is not expected to be until 2030. SpaceX disclosed in its prospectus that it has a history of losses and may never achieve profitability. Of the five largest IPOs in the past 25 years, only Visa significantly outperformed the broader market. Saudi Aramco has traded below its opening price since 2019. Queiroz notes that "the probability of an enthusiasm premium is real; what remains open is the magnitude of that premium and how long it will take to adjust." There is also the question of what investors will sell to make room for these mega-IPOs. Savvides suggests the answer could be "billions of dollars" in existing holdings, but he poses the harder question: "What are people going to sell?"

Geopolitical risk looms as well. Tensions in the Middle East, the U.S.-China technology competition, and domestic political uncertainty could all trigger market volatility severe enough to force companies to postpone their debuts. History shows that IPO windows close quickly when shocks hit. In 2022, the Russian invasion of Ukraine halted a wave of planned offerings. The pandemic did the same in March 2020. For now, though, the momentum appears unstoppable. The question is not whether these companies will go public, but whether the market's appetite for them—and the valuations they command—will hold when the real work of being a public company begins.