MW As SpaceX IPO anticipation heats up, what 2026's biggest IPOs say about investor demand

By Christine Idzelis

DataTrek digs into the performance of this year's largest 15 IPOs - and how the pace of listings compares with 1999 during the dot-com bubble

OpenAI has recently filed for an IPO, adding to investor anticipation for blockbuster listings.

Investors are paying close attention to huge initial public offerings expected this year, with questions about whether enthusiasm for the artificial-intelligence trade is strong enough to eat up the additional share supply.

ChatGPT maker OpenAI on Monday said it had filed confidentially for an initial public offering, following AI rival Anthropic's IPO filing on June 1. Meanwhile, investors are bracing for the biggest IPO ever, with the highly anticipated market debut of SpaceX $(SPCX)$ expected Friday.

"There's certainly enthusiasm around what is transformative technology," said Tony Ghee, head of equity investments in the chief investment office of Bank of America, in a phone interview Tuesday. "We think people want to be involved in what's, quite frankly, shaping up as a new world driven by artificial intelligence."

The IPO calendar is heating up with blockbuster deals as the bull market for U.S. stocks has run more than three years. DataTrek Research dug into how this year's 15 largest U.S. IPOs have fared, saying in a Tuesday note shared with MarketWatch that the IPO market serves as a gauge of investor confidence.

"This year's most notable IPOs have shown mixed returns since their debuts, but most (eight of 15) are still trading above their IPO prices despite the recent geopolitical and oil-price shock," wrote Jessica Rabe, DataTrek co-founder, in the note. Chip maker Cerebras Systems (CBRS) topped the list of large IPOs, with DataTrek noting the company's market value of around $52 billion in the table below.

The table above shows the largest IPOs so far in 2026 have returned an average of 31.1% from their debuts through Monday. Excluding Veradermics $(MANE)$, which is a hair-loss biotech company that's an outlier for its massive gain - the stock had closed Monday 431% above its IPO price - the average return is much smaller, at 2.5%, DataTrek found.

"The gap between these two figures suggests IPO investors are, on the whole, expressing a healthy wariness toward newly public companies, with a handful of standout winners accounting for most of the gains," said Rabe.

While some investors worry that the boom in AI has parallels to the market excitement of the dot-com era, the number of IPOs this year is well below the frenzied pace seen in 1999, before the internet bubble burst.

IPO issuance remains "relatively measured," with 68 deals completed this year, after just 90 seen in U.S. equity markets last year, according to the DataTrek note. That compares with 476 in the speculative bull market of 1999, said Rabe.

Still, the AI trade has helped fueled the stock market's rise this year. The Renaissance IPO ETF IPO has rallied 17.2% in 2026 as of recent afternoon trading Tuesday, while the S&P 500 index SPX has gained 7.7%.

The successful listing of AI chip maker Cerebras Systems (CBRS) last month "may be the strongest signal yet that the market is reopening for large-scale technology" lPOs, according to Rabe. Shares of Cerebras were 23% above their IPO price at last check.

SpaceX is aiming to raise $75 billion in an IPO at a fixed price of $135 per share, which would value the company at $1.77 trillion and mark the largest initial public offering ever.

"This year's IPO class suggests investors are willing to fund growth, but only when supported by credible business models and durable competitive advantages," said Rabe.

"The real question now is whether that discipline survives the arrival of SpaceX, the most anticipated IPO of the decade," she said. "If it does, 2026 may well be remembered as the year the U.S. IPO market truly reopened."

Cerebras reported 2025 revenue that rose 76% from a year ago to $509.99 million, while SpaceX said 2025 revenue increased 33% to $18.67 billion.

In Ghee's view, the current market environment is not exhibiting the same type of exuberance seen in the dot-com bubble. But "like with any cycle of innovation, you're going to have some winners and losers along the way," he said. "Time will tell who they ultimately will be."

The U.S. stock market was down Tuesday, with the S&P 500 SPX, the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite Index COMP and the Dow Jones Industrial Average COMP all falling in afternoon trading. But the S&P 500 remained up so far in 2026, with a year-to -date gain of around 7%, according to FactSet data. And the S&P 500's tech sector XX:SP500.45 has an even larger climb so far this year, of more than 14% as of Tuesday afternoon.

"The companies that enter public markets today can become tomorrow's long-term drivers of index-level returns," said Rabe. "The more high-quality businesses that reach public markets, the greater the chance that a handful will compound at outsized rates and anchor index returns over a decade or more."

-Christine Idzelis

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June 09, 2026 15:29 ET (19:29 GMT)

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