Three of the most valuable private companies on the planet are lining up to sell shares to the public within months of each other. OpenAI has confidentially filed paperwork with securities regulators. Anthropic filed its own paperwork in June, targeting a Nasdaq listing as soon as September or October. Elon Musk folded his AI venture, xAI, into SpaceX in February, and the combined company went public in June in what was then the largest stock offering in history. That timing traces back to a gap in the numbers.

OpenAI alone has committed about $1.4 trillion to data centers and computing power over the next eight years, according to figures Sam Altman shared in a post about the company’s finances last November. That money buys the buildings, chips, and electricity needed to run AI systems at global scale, years before that spending pays for itself. Its plan is one company’s share of the bill. The four large technology companies supplying most of that computing power, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta, now hold nearly $2.4 trillion in AI spending commitments between them, according to Bloomberg.

That spending has not been matched by sales. The company’s own revenue is now running at more than $40 billion a year, roughly double where it stood at the end of 2025, PYMNTS reported in August. Anthropic, OpenAI’s closest rival, said in May that its run-rate revenue had crossed $47 billion. Add the two together and the combined total is still less than a tenth of that $1.4 trillion commitment. Both companies are growing fast. Neither is growing fast enough yet to close a gap measured in trillions rather than billions.

Someone had to cover that gap between spending and sales, and it was mostly private investors rather than customers. Venture capital firms, private equity firms, and large technology companies supplied the cash in exchange for equity, a share of ownership in each company. Amazon has put $50 billion into OpenAI for roughly a 5% stake. It has also invested $13 billion directly into Anthropic, with commitments for up to $33 billion more, giving it around 21% of that company. Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm, holds positions in both OpenAI and xAI. Equity in a private company is hard to sell. A public listing changes that, turning paper ownership into shares that trade freely and convert to cash.

Cashing out now has a timeline. OpenAI is targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion. It has wavered between listing this year and waiting until 2027, after the shaky trading debut of the first company in this group to go public gave its advisers pause. Anthropic’s own backers expect a valuation near $2 trillion when it lists, which would make it the largest stock listing in history. That figure is more than double the $965 billion value the company reached in a funding round this past May. xAI’s route to the public market already happened. Folded into SpaceX in February, it went public in June in an offering that raised more than $85 billion. The AI unit absorbed in that deal lost $6.36 billion in 2025 and kept burning cash into this year. The same pattern, spending ahead of revenue, is playing out inside a company that has already gone public.

None of this requires anyone to decide they want to own AI stock. Nasdaq changed its own rules this May in a move built around SpaceX’s debut. Large new listings now join its main stock index after 15 days of trading, instead of the previous three-month wait. When SpaceX joined the Nasdaq-100 in July, funds tracking that index had to automatically buy about $4.3 billion of the stock. That pulled in every 401(k) and retirement account built on a Nasdaq-100 fund, with no individual choice involved. Reporting on that rule change noted OpenAI and Anthropic are both structured to qualify for the same fast entry once they list. The same mechanism is positioned to repeat when they do.

Whether these listings reward the public investors who end up holding shares is not yet answered. What has already happened is the mechanism that gets them there: index funds built to track the market, not to judge whether a trillion dollars of spending has been matched by a trillion dollars of demand. Anthropic’s filing puts that mechanism back on the calendar within weeks.

Sources

Yahoo Finance, Sam Altman Says OpenAI Has $20B ARR and About $1.4 Trillion in Data Center Commitments – finance.yahoo.com
Bloomberg, Big Tech Holds $2 Trillion of Spending Commitments for AI Boom – bloomberg.com
PYMNTS, OpenAI’s Revenue Run Rate Tops $40 Billion as IPO Nears – pymnts.com
CNBC, How Amazon’s Massive Stake in OpenAI Could Boost Its AI and Cloud Businesses – cnbc.com
The Motley Fool, Amazon’s Hidden Anthropic Stake Could Be Worth More Than Investors Realize – fool.com
Silicon Report, Andreessen Horowitz’s $15 Billion Fund and the AI Portfolio It Built – siliconreport.com
Forbes, OpenAI May Delay Its IPO To 2027, Report Says – forbes.com
PYMNTS, Anthropic Could Seek $2 Trillion Valuation in Record IPO – pymnts.com
Tech Times, Nasdaq Rewrote Its Rules for SpaceX; Now $4.3B in Passive Buying Forces Index Funds’ Hands – techtimes.com