Three companies, three listings, one enormous question. SpaceX is scheduled to begin trading on the Nasdaq on June 12, seeking a valuation around $1.77 trillion. Anthropic filed its IPO paperwork on June 1, targeting a listing as early as October. OpenAI is expected to follow. Analysts at Wedbush have called this the opening of the floodgates for the IPO market, which had been relatively quiet for a few years.
The numbers behind each company deserve some plain-language translation. Anthropic recently raised $65 billion in a single funding round at a valuation of $965 billion, just ahead of its filing. Its stated revenue run rate rose from $9 billion at the end of 2025 to $47 billion by late May 2026, a pace that almost no technology company in history has matched. Analysts have flagged, however, that the way Anthropic accounts for its revenue may inflate the headline figures, and the full financial picture will only emerge when it publishes its formal prospectus.
SpaceX is a more complicated story. The company merged with Elon Musk's AI lab, xAI, in February 2026, which turned it from a profitable rocket company into a loss-making one. In 2024, before the merger, SpaceX earned $791 million in net income. After the merger, it reported a net loss of nearly $5 billion for 2025 and a further $4.28 billion loss in the first quarter of 2026. The AI division alone lost $6.36 billion from operations last year. Morningstar has estimated the company is worth roughly $780 billion, about half its IPO target price.
The IPO rush is riding on top of a building boom of extraordinary scale. The four largest tech companies spent roughly $413 billion on data centers and AI infrastructure in 2025, more than double their combined spend in 2023, and are expected to spend between $600 and $700 billion in 2026. McKinsey estimates total global investment in AI-related data center capacity could reach between $5 and $8 trillion over the next five years. Power supply is already the main bottleneck: 72% of data center operators surveyed by Deloitte called power and grid capacity very or extremely challenging.
The central tension in all of this is the gap between spending and returns. Two-thirds of organizations report productivity and efficiency gains from AI, and worker access to AI tools rose 50% in 2025 alone. But only 20% of organizations are actually growing revenue through AI right now, even though 74% say they hope to. Only 29% of companies report significant return on investment from generative AI, despite widespread individual productivity gains. The infrastructure investment is real. The financial return, at scale, is still being built.
For business operators watching from the outside, the IPOs matter for two reasons. First, once these companies are public, they must report their actual revenues, costs, and profits every three months. That transparency will settle, or deepen, the debate about whether AI spending is justified. Second, whichever of Anthropic or OpenAI reaches the market first will have a fundraising and credibility advantage over the other, since both are seeking tens of billions in fresh capital in close succession.
Many analysts believe the infrastructure being built now will be useful long after any hype fades, in the same way that the fiber-optic cables laid during the dot-com bubble eventually powered the modern internet. That is a reasonable view. It is also possible to hold that view and still conclude that several of today's specific valuations are too high. The two are not mutually exclusive, and the public markets are about to find out which companies have the numbers to back their price tags.