AI companies – From SpaceX’s planned $75 billion IPO to Anthropic’s confidential SEC filing and OpenAI’s push for a fall debut, leading AI firms are moving fast toward Wall Street—fuelled by massive cash burn, record market optimism, and mounting fears that the rush could ov
The race to bring artificial intelligence to Wall Street is speeding up—and it’s doing so with numbers that sound unreal even to people watching markets every day.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX is preparing a public offering that could raise up to $75 billion this month. a scale that would set up one of the largest-ever stock market debuts. The company’s financial picture. though. is not built on profits: SpaceX lost $2.6 billion from operations last year on $18.7 billion in revenue. according to a May regulatory filing. and losses continued to stack up at the start of this year.
That IPO plan arrives after SpaceX merged in February with Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI. xAI—featuring the Grok chatbot—lost $6.4 billion in operations last year, according to a company document. The deal pushed SpaceX’s valuation from $800 billion last year to $1.25 trillion after the merger.
But the move has also carried a flashpoint inside the shareholder community. Musk got SpaceX to buy xAI earlier this year despite protests from some SpaceX investors that it was a bailout and unethical, given that he was a controlling shareholder in both companies.
It is the same tension markets often feel when money and belief move faster than balance sheets: public equity is the cheapest source of capital in an expensive environment, even as skeptics warn the technology is still nascent and unproven.
“These companies are now burning through cash to win the AI race, and public equity is the cheapest source available, particularly in a rising interest rate environment,” said Michael Field, chief equity analyst at Morningstar.
For all the excitement, worries about an AI bubble have been gathering in the background. Some experts fear tech companies and venture capitalists are pouring too much money into a technology that remains early.
Against that backdrop, Anthropic’s approach looks more like a patient step toward the market—at least on paper, before the fireworks.
Anthropic, the maker of the Claude chatbot, was formed in 2021 by ex-OpenAI leaders. The company was recently valued at $965 billion, and it is now moving toward going public on Wall Street. On June 1, Anthropic announced it has submitted a confidential filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for a proposed IPO.
The company says it is already selling its way into the valuation story: Anthropic has said it is making annualized revenue of $47 billion from selling its technology to people and organizations using Claude to write code and do other work and personal tasks on their behalf.
Then there is OpenAI, a company that helped ignite the modern AI boom—and now is navigating a more complicated path to the public markets.
The maker of ChatGPT began in 2015 as a nonprofit dedicated to developing AI for the common good. It is now a company valued at $852 billion and planning an IPO as soon as this fall.
OpenAI’s timing, however, comes with the pressure of being overtaken. While Anthropic’s rise and Claude’s growing popularity have left OpenAI “playing catch-up,” the company has also not yet reported filing initial IPO paperwork with the SEC.
That standing is tangled further by a legal battle involving Elon Musk, who is also an OpenAI co-founder. In an unsuccessful lawsuit against OpenAI and its top executives. Musk claimed the company diverted from its founding mission to make more money. OpenAI countered that Musk was simply seeking a bigger slice of the company.
Outside the IPO pipeline, the AI build-out has already been baked into public-company balance sheets.
Google designed the Gemini AI assistant in response to a competitive threat posed by OpenAI’s ChatGPT. which came out in late 2022. Gemini AI models are integrated into Google search and other products such as Maps. Alphabet—Google’s Mountain View. California-based parent company—was valued at $4.54 trillion at the beginning of June. up from $2.3 trillion a year earlier. a jump that the article frames as a sign that Alphabet’s spending spree on AI is producing dividends so far. despite investor worries about some of its peers’ massive AI investments.
Meta’s AI push has taken a different shape: integrating its assistant. Llama. into all aspects of its business. including advertising and consumer-facing tools such as a digital assistant that can help with daily tasks. as well as image and video creation. Llama is open source, meaning it is largely available to the public and to developers. Meta AI is available as a standalone app and it is integrated into the Menlo Park. California-based company’s smart glasses. Meta’s market value as of early June was $1.55 trillion. down from $1.76 trillion a year earlier amid investor concerns about the company’s massive AI spending.
Microsoft. which went public 40 years ago. has been positioned as a key enabler of the AI surge rather than a newcomer to it. It likely would have been “running behind in the AI race” were it not for a timely multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI. Microsoft provided the computing power and financial backing that helped OpenAI build ChatGPT. In turn, Microsoft was able to use the same technical foundation to power its own AI assistant, now called Copilot. The once-exclusive partnership has since evolved as both companies look to other partners to advance their AI ambitions.
The common thread is simple. even if the numbers are dizzying: the push toward public listings is being driven by the scale of what it takes to build and maintain AI models. the wider pursuit of artificial general intelligence that can surpass humans at many tasks. and the pace of widespread AI adoption that has helped lift the stock market to record highs.
In that environment, the market’s appetite for big stories is colliding with a reality that still shows up in filings—losses that keep climbing, and investors who must decide how much risk they are willing to price in before products and timelines fully catch up.
AI IPO SpaceX IPO xAI Anthropic OpenAI ChatGPT Claude Wall Street SEC filing valuations Morningstar Michael Field market bubble concerns