America’s IPO Mini-Boom Just Opened the Door
On Wednesday, SpaceX filed paperwork with the SEC, kicking off what will almost certainly be the largest IPO in U.S. history. Polymarket has SpaceX going public above $1 trillion at a near-certainty, and above $2 trillion at 73%. OpenAI is reportedly working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to file in days. Anthropic just disclosed that Q2 revenue will more than double to $10.9 billion — enough to flip the company to operating profitability for the first time.
This is the IPO market that was supposedly dead. Three of the most valuable private companies in the country are all preparing to go public in the same window, and Goldman Sachs (GS) closed at $999.50 on Thursday — one cent shy of four digits — partly because the IPO advisory pipeline just refilled.
Why It Matters For Public-Market Investors
You can’t buy SpaceX in your IRA. You can’t buy OpenAI in your 401(k). What you can do is buy the public-company picks and shovels that benefit from this capex cycle.
The Wall Street Journal’s “Heard On The Street” column made the case Friday that Nvidia (NVDA) is underappreciated even at a $5 trillion market cap. We agree. Anthropic, in its Q1 financials, disclosed that it spent 71 cents on compute for every dollar of revenue. That ratio is improving (Q2 guidance: 56 cents per dollar), but the rate of absolute compute spend is exploding. Nvidia is on the receiving end of that.
The supporting cast: Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) committed $10 billion to Taiwan’s chip sector this week. Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) is the foundry of choice for AMD’s next-gen Venice CPU. Broadcom (AVGO) has the custom-silicon partnerships that the hyperscalers actually rely on. Arm Holdings (ARM) ripped 16% to a 52-week high Thursday on the agentic-AI CPU thesis.
The Power Layer Underneath
An IPO mini-boom in AI also means a continued capex boom in data center power — the most underappreciated derivative trade we have. GE Vernova (GEV), Vertiv (VRT), Bloom Energy (BE, +9% on Thursday to a new 52-week high), Enphase Energy (ENPH, +17% on Thursday), and Constellation Energy (CEG) all sit on the receiving end of the same capex.
One more name to watch: International Business Machines (IBM). On Thursday it announced Anderon, a federally backed quantum-computing foundry, and the stock ripped 12%. Roughly a dozen U.S. quantum companies are receiving government investment or equity stakes. That’s a $1B+ federal incentive program for an entirely new computing platform. The thesis used to be 10 years out. It just got pulled forward.
A Note On Risk
The 1990s comparison is irresistible. Today’s AI investor euphoria does in fact recall the heady dot-com days. Some of these IPOs will be overpriced. Some will trade above their open and never come back to it. But the elegies written about American capitalism over the last several years — that the public market is dead, that companies stay private forever, that retail investors are locked out — just got refuted in the most concrete possible way.
The American IPO market is the deepest, most liquid, most competitive in the world. No other country can produce a SpaceX, an OpenAI, and an Anthropic at the same time. That is a structural advantage. We’re positioned for it.