AI Giants Shake the Capital Market: SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic Could Create the Largest Exit Wave in US VC History

Odaily reports that the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA) and PitchBook recently released the "Venture Monitor" report, stating that the combined value brought by the IPO of SpaceX, along with the potential IPOs of Anthropic and OpenAI, will reach an unprecedented level. The report states: "With the SpaceX IPO and the future exits of these companies, the value they create will exceed the total exit value of all US VC-backed companies since 2000." The core factor lies in the extremely high valuation expectations for the three companies.

SpaceX is currently valued at approximately $1.77 trillion, while Anthropic and OpenAI are also approaching multi-trillion-dollar valuations. The market expects that the combined valuation of the three companies could exceed $4 trillion. This scale far surpasses past large-scale tech IPOs. According to US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) data, total US IPO fundraising last year was approximately $70 billion, while SpaceX's single-company valuation has already reached a level that traditional large IPOs can hardly match. As a once-highly-anticipated tech IPO case, Uber had a valuation of about $84 billion when it went public in 2019, which is less than 5% of SpaceX's current valuation.

However, the NVCA and PitchBook comparison is based on "enterprise value creation," not the actual cash-out amount for investors. At the same time, the analysis excludes non-US companies such as Alibaba. Additionally, the value created by already-listed companies like Apple, Google Android, YouTube, and Instagram is not counted in the VC exit statistics.

The report points out that the past 25 years have seen several historic IPOs in the US tech market, including Google in 2004, Tesla in 2010, and Meta in 2012. These companies have all become some of the most valuable companies globally. In addition, companies like LinkedIn, Slack, and WhatsApp have been acquired at scale exceeding $20 billion.

The NVCA believes that this IPO cycle driven by artificial intelligence (AI) may further break these records. Analysis suggests two main reasons driving this trend:

First, tech companies are staying private for longer periods than in the past, accumulating higher valuations through long-term fundraising and business expansion. If today's Google were in its early stages, it might also choose to go public later to achieve a higher market valuation.

Second, the AI industry is highly capital-intensive. Training large AI models requires massive capital investment, pushing AI companies to continuously raise large sums, which in turn drives rapid valuation growth.

Industry insiders believe that the potential IPO scale of SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI will test the US capital market's capacity to absorb. As AI companies move from the private fundraising phase to the public market, how trillions of dollars in tech assets flow to the stock market will become a focus for investors. (DigitalToday)