AI prepares the assault on Wall Street

BarcelonaThe war has begun and Elon Musk has fired first. The mega IPO of SpaceX, the all-encompassing technology company of the world's richest man, has opened the doors of Wall Street to generative AI. Although it is known for its rockets and defense contracts, SpaceX has housed xAI since February of this year, the company within the South African's conglomerate that manages its consumer artificial intelligence, the chatbot integrated into the X social network, Grok. Musk's public offering sets the path for the rest of the sector: a historically high capitalization target —$1.75 trillion— and billions raised to add to the immense computing investments that will be needed to cover growing demand. Following behind are Anthropic, the creator of Claude, which has the fourth quarter marked in red, and OpenAI, of ChatGPT, which left behind the legal problems with Musk and already has a clear path to join the New York stock exchange.

Anthropic, as both the Financial Times and the Wall Street Journal have reported, has already explored the market for an IPO that could occur during October of this year. OpenAI, for its part, has not yet made these moves, although analysts consulted assume that, given the venture of its competitors, it should not take long to join, and speculation points to a date between the fourth quarter of this year and the first of 2027.

The new AI millionaires, therefore, will storm the stock markets in a matter of months, and they will all do so, according to the head of equity at TREA AM, Xavier Brun, for similar reasons. The situation, for the expert, is ideal. "The business is very investment-intensive, and all players need capital," he comments. The billions they will obtain from the sale of their first share issuances will serve, in the short term, to continue financing data centers, new computing, and the cruising speed evolution of generative AI models that are updated every few weeks.

In a similar vein, Jaume Puig, CEO of GVC Gaesco, expresses that he identifies the leap to the public market with an intention to "maximize the moment of interest" of investors in technology. "A lot of capital will buy the concept instead of buying the company," considers Puig, who sees behind the rush of the three competitors a recognition of the intrinsic uncertainty in the artificial intelligence market. "If I were sure of the performance, I wouldn't take the company public now. I would do it in three or four years," with the business model stabilized. Then, however, investors "will already have a much clearer idea of the technology's potential, and also its limits."

SpaceX has demonstrated, according to the results it has communicated to the US stock market regulator, that the cash injection is necessary. Musk's company lost 4.2 billion dollars in the first quarter after investing nearly 8 billion in AI, and everything suggests that capital expenditures for the current year will be historically high. The situation is similar for its competitors: OpenAI does not expect to generate profits until the end of the decade. Anthropic, for its part, calculates that it could see its first net profits as early as this summer, with a more stable business client model that does not require as much external investment. Analysts consulted agree on the diagnosis, but do not discount such an optimistic timeline: the company of siblings Dario and Daniela Amodei "has a better trajectory towards cash generation," in the eyes of eToro expert Javier Molina, although positive cash figures would not arrive until 2027.

Extreme valuations

SpaceX's exit, therefore, has marked the path that the rest of the players in the generative and agentive AI field can follow. Elon Musk's new jewel in the crown aims to break into the Nasdaq, the technology selective of the New York Stock Exchange, in early June, with a valuation that would range between 1.75 and 2 trillion dollars. Currently, after the merger of the aerospace and technological arms, the company is worth about 1.25 trillion. The valuations that OpenAI and Anthropic aspire to are slightly more moderate: Sam Altman's company would wish, as the CNBC channel advanced, to make the leap to the selective with a valuation of one trillion dollars, while its derivative and main competitor would do so, according to pre-IPO contacts revealed by the WSJ, at around 900 billion.

In Puig's view, the difference comes not so much from the business as from the brand: "When the investor accesses OpenAI or Anthropic, they access the company. In the case of SpaceX, the promise is Elon Musk." For the expert, the projects around Claude and ChatGPT have more solid business foundations than Musk's AI proposals, as well as several of his ideas in the aerospace field. The 2 trillion he expects to reach responds more to "futurism," such as his idea of the "one-hour global journey," in which users could travel anywhere on the planet in less than 60 minutes by rocket. "There are many people who, if they look at SpaceX's projects, wouldn't trust many of them. But they buy Musk," he maintains.

The figure of the richest man on the planet also allows for much more aggressive governance moves than any other company in its sector. It should be remembered that, according to the documentation provided to the regulator, SpaceX will be a "controlled company": 85% of the voting rights will remain in the hands of the South African magnate, and he will not have to cede a majority of the board seats to independents. For Puig, neither OpenAI nor Anthropic will have room for such a move. Brun, for his part, does not see it so far off: the Trea expert recalls that "the separation of shares between A —the main shares, with voice and vote on the company's decisions— and B—financial instruments without influence on governance— is a very normal phenomenon in the United States." In this sense, he sees an opening for both Altman and the Amodeis to reduce the free float they put on the market and maintain, as Musk has done, clear control over the company.

Shareholders squeeze

Although investors may "buy the idea" rather than the business fundamentals, the market considers that shareholders will soon demand, at least, a well-structured returns plan. For now, in the eyes of XTB analyst Javier Cabrera, the unlimited expectations of AI's effect on the economy generate a certain "myopia" among capitalists, who would join any project with this label. "The market only values the most optimistic scenario, but the risk is very high," warns the financial observer. In this sense, experts link the stability of the stock price to AI's ability to continue convincing shareholders that future returns are more important than present losses. Cabrera recalls, for example, the blow that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, suffered when its bet on the metaverse deflated: between September 2021 and November 2022, Mark Zuckerberg's firm lost 76% of its value on the open market.

However, the market observes clear differences between all the actors involved. SpaceX already has profitable businesses, such as Starlink satellite connectivity or the space launch business itself, but its future bets are more unstable. Open AI, experts indicate, has not yet found out what its future business will be. Of the three, Anthropic is the one that has best managed to land in the real economy. The creator of Claude has, in the eyes of the analyst from the financial "boutique Gesinter Ferran Carreras, "a more solid model, because it sells to companies, and does not rely solely on the end user." "It has better growth prospects, and is in a more stable moment," adds the economist.

Furthermore, of the three probable IPOs, the Amodeis' is the most modest, without the risk of an exit above a trillion dollars. In Brun's opinion, ChatGPT will not confirm its forecasts until it reaches a "critical mass" of end-users. Even with more than 900 million weekly users, according to the company's own documents, "at 20 euros a month, the accounts don't add up." "It will need to double or triple its customers," argues the expert, to have healthy accounts; figures that would emulate the reach of digital giants like Spotify or Netflix.

Google, the fourth in discord

Among the best-known names in the AI segment, Google's is the one that least needs a new boost on the stock market. After the implementation of its generative model, Gemini, in the search engine's work ecosystem —it now operates seamlessly in Drive, Calendar, Gmail, and Chrome itself— Alphabet's subsidiary's model is the fastest growing in the entire industry: according to major digital portals, Gemini already has over 750 million monthly users. Furthermore, it has the advantage that its business does not depend exclusively on AI uses, but is integrated within the entire Google ecosystem, which still benefits from digital advertising and the use and commercialization of data. "Google has all the information, that's its advantage," considers Puig.

It is on this advantage that the market is beginning to glimpse the possibility that Alphabet, driven by Gemini, can compete in a race that seemed more than decided during 2025: the Mountain View giant is getting closer and closer to the valuation of Nvidia, the manufacturer of graphics memory cards for data centers and computers that holds the throne as the most valuable company on the planet. The figures are still far off: at the close of the last session, Google's parent company registered a capitalization of 4.6 trillion dollars, while the firm led by Jensen Huang still exceeds 5.2 trillion. Nevertheless, Carreras sees it as "the clearest candidate" to overcome the rival. "It can snatch the gold medal," she concludes.