The IPO Hat-Trick: OpenAI Just Joined the Biggest Parade in Market History
Alex Rivera · Startups & Money · June 10, 2026
Three weeks ago, it was a forecast. Two weeks ago, it was a race. Now it is a parade. OpenAI’s confidential IPO filing on June 9 made it official: the three most valuable private companies in the world — OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX — are all going public in the same year. Combined, they will attempt to raise roughly $200 billion from public markets at an aggregate valuation approaching $4 trillion. There has never been a moment like this in the history of capital markets.
The math is staggering — and oddly simple. Anthropic filed first on June 1, less than a week after closing its $65 billion Series H at a $965 billion valuation. OpenAI followed with a ‘get ahead of the leaks’ filing on June 9, joining its archrival and completing what CNBC called ‘the hat trick of tech IPOs.’ SpaceX prices this Friday — June 12 — with terms that would raise $75 billion at a $1.8 trillion market cap, according to Renaissance Capital.
203 IPOs have been announced year-to-date — the third-highest H1 count of the last decade, according to See It Market. The public window is not just open; it has been kicked off its hinges.
Table of Contents
01The Three-Way Collision That Was Always Coming
02SpaceX: The $1.8 Trillion Elephant This Friday
03The Rotation: Tech Stocks Are Bleeding Into Industrials
04What the 203-Filing Pipeline Actually Means
05Who Wins — and Who Gets Left Behind
203 IPOs have been filed in H1 2026 — the third-highest count of the last decade. | Source: Pexels
01 — The Three-Way Collision That Was Always Coming
This wasn’t a coincidence. Anthropic’s $47 billion annualised revenue run rate — up from $9 billion at the end of 2025 — created an urgency that private markets alone couldn’t satisfy. OpenAI, which absorbed $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation, watched its rival vault ahead and concluded that waiting meant losing. SpaceX, with its $1.8 trillion target, is in a category of its own — it is not an AI company, but it is the infrastructure company that the AI boom depends on.
The timing is historic but the underlying logic is straightforward. As Anthropic co-founder Daniela Amodei told Bloomberg Tech last week, industry leaders need ‘stable capital flows over time, and public markets are the most suitable place to meet this need.’ Translation: when you are burning billions every month on compute — Anthropic recently signed a $1.25 billion per month contract with xAI for computing power — private investors cannot be your only source of fuel indefinitely.
The three-IPO collision is not about cashing out. It is about who gets to build the compute infrastructure that powers the next decade of AI. The companies going public fastest are the ones that understand this: the race to capital is a race to compute, and public markets are the only source deep enough to fund it.
02 — SpaceX: The $1.8 Trillion Elephant This Friday
SpaceX is the opening act — and it is the biggest IPO in history. Priced at roughly $135 per share with 555.6 million shares offered, the listing would raise $75 billion at a $1.8 trillion market cap, CNBC reported. For context, that is larger than the combined IPO proceeds of every company that went public in all of 2024.
Institutional investors are preparing by rebalancing portfolios — selling richly valued AI and tech stocks to fund SpaceX allocations. Friday’s Nasdaq and S&P 500 declines were a preview of the capital reallocation that a $75 billion IPO demands. As Barchart noted, ‘the convergence of tech sector rotation, historic IPO capital flows, inflation data, and enterprise earnings creates one of the year’s most transformative weeks.’ The SpaceX IPO alone could suck enough liquidity out of tech stocks to trigger a sector-wide correction.
SpaceX’s IPO this Friday could raise $75 billion — more than all IPOs combined in 2024. | Source: Pexels
03 — The Rotation: Tech Stocks Are Bleeding Into Industrials
The market rotation that began last week is real and accelerating. Friday’s steep Nasdaq decline was not a random sell-off — it was a structural reallocation of institutional capital away from AI and tech stocks toward the industrials, defence, and energy names that benefit from the SpaceX-IPO liquidity wave. This is what happens when a $75 billion capital event collides with an already-overheated tech sector.
It was recently revealed that Anthropic signed a $1.25 billion per month contract with xAI for computing power, according to Zamin.uz. These are the numbers that explain why private markets are no longer sufficient: when a single company is spending $15 billion a year on compute alone, the IPO is not optional — it is existential.
And the vibecoding boom continues minting new billion-dollar startups at an extraordinary pace. Supabase raised $500 million at a $10.5 billion valuation last week. Lovable, the Stockholm-based AI coding startup, is in talks for a $12 billion valuation after crossing $400 million in ARR. Generalist AI, backed by Nvidia, raised $400 million at a $2 billion valuation for robotics models. The money is flowing — it is just flowing to a smaller and smaller number of companies.
04 — What the 203-Filing Pipeline Actually Means
203 IPOs filed year-to-date. For comparison, there were 154 IPOs in all of 2024, and just 71 in the drought year of 2022. The pipeline has evolved beyond speculative concept plays — companies like Quantinuum (quantum computing, $15.9 billion valuation), INNIO (natural gas engines, $20.3 billion), and Helion (nuclear fusion, $15.5 billion after a $465 million round) are going public with real revenue and real industrial applications.
Helion’s latest round, led by Thrive Capital, nearly tripled its valuation from $5.4 billion in January 2025 to $15.5 billion — powered by a deal to supply Microsoft with fusion electricity by 2028. These are not concept stocks. They are infrastructure companies with government and enterprise contracts that would have been impossible to imagine a decade ago.
The IPO surge is not a bubble — it is a market structure shift. The 2022–2024 drought created a backlog of mature, revenue-generating private companies that are now hitting the public markets simultaneously. The AI boom accelerated their timelines, but the underlying companies are fundamentally different from the speculative IPO class of 2021.
05 — Who Wins — and Who Gets Left Behind
The winners are clear: institutional investors with the balance sheet to participate in all three mega-listings, retail investors who get early access to the most consequential companies of the decade, and the AI-native startups — the Supabases, Lovables, and Generalist AIs — that will ride the public-market wave to their own IPOs in 2027 and 2028.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told CNBC his company plans to go public in 2028 regardless of how the mega-listings perform. That confidence — planning a 2028 IPO before the 2026 class has even priced — tells you everything about the state of the market. The pipeline is not just full; it is stacked years into the future.
The losers: the fallen unicorns — the Glossiers and AG1s of the world whose 2021 valuations were inflated by a zero-interest-rate environment that no longer exists. Their IPOs are not coming. Their best exit is acquisition at a fraction of peak valuation. And the pre-ChatGPT cohort of startups that haven’t integrated AI into their core products will find public markets indifferent. The math is simple: AI is the gravity well, and everything else is in free fall.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX all going public at the same time?
The convergence is driven by compute costs. Anthropic spends $1.25 billion per month on computing power alone. OpenAI’s $122 billion March round cannot be repeated. SpaceX needs capital for Starship and Starlink expansion. Private markets cannot fund these companies indefinitely — the IPO is not a choice, it is a necessity. The timing overlap is coincidental, but the underlying pressure is identical across all three.
How much will the three IPOs raise combined?
The three IPOs are expected to raise roughly $200 billion in aggregate: SpaceX approximately $75 billion at a $1.8 trillion valuation, Anthropic and OpenAI amounts still to be determined but expected to be in the tens of billions each. The combined market capitalisation of all three could approach $4 trillion — more than the GDP of Germany.
Is the IPO rush creating a market bubble?
Analysts are split. The 203 IPOs filed in H1 2026 is the third-highest count of the last decade, and the market rotation away from tech stocks suggests investors are being selective. The key difference from 2021: these companies have real revenue. Anthropic is at $47 billion annualised. SpaceX has government and commercial contracts. The risk is not that the companies lack substance — it is that public markets may struggle to absorb $200 billion in new issuance in a single year.
What does the SpaceX IPO mean for retail investors?
SpaceX is pricing at roughly $135 per share with 555.6 million shares offered. Retail access will depend on brokerage allocations, but demand is expected to be extraordinary. The IPO is likely to be one of the most oversubscribed in history. Institutional investors are already repositioning portfolios — selling tech stocks — to participate.
Which startups are next in the IPO pipeline after the big three?
Perplexity is targeting 2028. Cerebras recently went public. Companies like Supabase ($10.5B valuation), Lovable ($12B), and Helion ($15.5B) are strong candidates for 2027–2028 IPOs. The pipeline beyond the mega-three is deep and predominantly AI-native, suggesting the IPO wave has years to run.
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