The long-awaited cycle for artificial intelligence initial public offerings is beginning to crystallize around three names: SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic.

Bankers, lawyers, and private market investors describe the coming debuts as a staggered contest for capital, attention, and technological credibility that could transform public equity markets the way the dot-com boom did a quarter century ago.

The comparison, though, has limits.

“Between 1995 and 2000, there were 2,600 IPOs,” said Art Hogan, chief market strategist at B. Riley Wealth. “Of those 2,600, only 153 still exist.”

Today’s frenzy is concentrated in a handful of firms commanding valuations that, adjusted for inflation, rival the speculative intensity of that era. The difference, Hogan contends, is that capital is now consolidating around fewer, more mature companies that have stayed private far longer than earlier technology generations.

That concentration is creating unusual pressure on public markets. Fund managers, he warned, may need to sell existing positions to make room for offerings of this magnitude.

“You don’t want all these IPOs stacked on top of each other,” said Hogan.

SpaceX sets the pace

SpaceX is positioned to fire the starting gun.

Industry sources say the company is targeting 11 June to price its shares and 12 June to begin trading, setting the stage for the largest public debut of all time.

“The first company to come out is going to capture most of the buzz,” Hogan said. “They’ll be the one everyone focuses on first.”

Yet SpaceX may not establish a clean benchmark for pure-play AI valuations. Its sprawling business – rockets, satellites, Starlink, defense contracts – resists easy comparables.

“People are struggling to do the math of the parts to get to the valuation of the whole,” said one sector advisor.

Due to SpaceX’s complexities, Wall Street increasingly sees OpenAI and Anthropic as the companies that will ultimately define how the market values pure play large language models.

Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO on 1 June, becoming the first of the major pure-play AI developers to formally begin the listing process.

The race behind the scenes

OpenAI is also moving quickly.

Hogan pointed to the company’s recent courtroom victory against Elon Musk as removing a significant overhang.

A confidential filing, he said, is expected to come soon.

“You just don’t want to be the last one out. There is a finite amount of investment dollars,” Hogan said.

Timing, however, is not simply about enthusiasm.

Both OpenAI and Anthropic are still building the operational infrastructure that public-company life demands – auditable books, compliant controls, forecastable financials – while simultaneously racing to advance rapidly evolving AI systems.

OpenAI faces an additional complication: substantial operating losses driven by the cost of training frontier models and maintaining free consumer products.

“A lot of its IPO pitch will focus on the consumer story,” said one senior ECM lawyer, “and the adoption of ChatGPT. That’s how they differentiate.”

There may be strategic value in waiting for that story to mature.

Investors will also need to weigh the scale of future capital requirements.

“The capex argument there becomes enormous,” said David Koch, founder and managing partner at Koch Capital Advisory. “Sam Altman has been very vocal about how much capital needs to go in to remain a market-leading LLM.”

Anthropic’s enterprise edge

For now, many investors and enterprise customers view Anthropic as holding the strongest commercial position.

“Anthropic is winning the AI narrative, at least temporarily,” Hogan said. “But this changes constantly. One month Gemini looks ahead. Then Claude jumps ahead. Then OpenAI regains momentum. It’s like watching a horse race where the lead changes every lap.”

The core question for investors is simple: which company ultimately builds the most commercially valuable large language model. Enterprise customers, Hogan said, are testing all the major models simultaneously and constantly reevaluating.

Private market participants say Anthropic has earned significant credibility through products including Claude for Work and Claude Code. “It’s nonstop momentum on the Claude side,” Koch said.

Leadership, though, remains fluid.

Product cycles measured in weeks, not years, make public market timing unusually delicate. No company wants to list and immediately appear technologically behind.

Capital is ready

The broader IPO market has already begun reopening after years of relative quiet.

“We went from having hardly any IPOs to a full calendar,” said Hogan.

The AI listings will likely operate in a category of their own.

Capital, some advisors argue, is not the constraint.

“The capital will show up because of the potential for outsized returns,” the sector advisor said.

The concern is allocation and sequencing. Large institutional investors may need to rotate out of existing holdings to participate meaningfully in AI offerings that could each command valuations well into the hundreds of billions.

Hogan suggested the listings may “need to be spaced so each company gets its own market window.”

The sequencing matters for another reason as well: whichever pure-play AI company lists first could end up establishing the valuation framework for the entire sector.

One ECM banker compared the dynamic to early social-media IPOs, arguing that the first successful AI issuer could effectively define which metrics investors prioritize.

“Once one model gets out, everyone looks to that as the gold standard,” the ECM banker said. “If companies that follow don’t fit that gold standard, maybe they don’t get the returns right.”

“That’s a lot of responsibility,” the sector advisor said. “Whoever goes first is going to set the benchmark for AI multiples.”