By Bradley Olson

SpaceX's soaring shares, which brought the company's market value to $2.1 trillion on Friday, was a stunning debut for the first of what could be three of the largest IPOs in history.

AI giants Anthropic and OpenAI have filed paperwork in preparation for potential public listings and could IPO later this year.

What does SpaceX say about investor appetite for AI?

Investors are clearly enthusiastic about SpaceX, which is primarily known for rocket launching and the Starlink satellite service but also has substantial revenue from AI. The company recently signed contracts worth tens of billions of dollars to provide computing firepower to AI companies including Anthropic and Google through its Colossus data centers.

It's far from certain whether SpaceX's first-day performance will carry over to OpenAI and Anthropic, which are primarily focused on developing the most powerful and capable AI models. OpenAI is developing devices, advertises in its flagship ChatGPT product and is locked in a war for business users with Anthropic, which has primarily focused on coding and enterprise customers.

What about losses?

Operating a frontier AI lab has always been a cash-burning exercise, and it's well known that OpenAI and Anthropic lose billions of dollars. While Anthropic told investors that it expected to turn a surprise operating profit in the second quarter of this year, the company is still on pace to lose money in spite of the rapid growth the company has seen.

OpenAI is also on track to lose billions of dollars for the next several years, according to financial information it's shared with investors.

But SpaceX lost $4.9 billion last year on revenue of $18.7 billion, so losses don't seem to have spooked investors that greeted the company's IPO enthusiastically.

Does it matter which company files next?

Banks have told both OpenAI and Anthropic that the first to make it to market can define the industry and access large pools of cash. For a time, a prevailing assumption of tech insiders was that being first would provide a huge advantage, but the interest in SpaceX may prompt many to revisit that view.

Anthropic's confidential filing earlier this month put the company behind the Claude model on a path to go public in the fall.

OpenAI said in a written statement earlier this week that "it may be a while" until it goes public because there are "things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company." There are a "complicated set of tradeoffs" tied to going public, the company said.

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(END) Dow Jones Newswires

June 12, 2026 17:09 ET (21:09 GMT)

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