Space Exploration Technologies, aka SpaceX, made history in June when it had the largest initial public offering (IPO) ever, raising nearly $85.7 billion. That was followed just a few weeks later by South Korean memory giant SK Hynix cross-listing on the Nasdaq Exchange, raising $26.5 billion through the sale of American depositary shares in the largest-ever foreign company listing in the U.S.
The spate of new tech arrivals on Wall Street is not over yet, and the market has been anticipating IPOs from artificial intelligence (AI) powerhouses Anthropic, maker of large language model (LLM) Claude, and OpenAI, maker of LLM ChatGPT. Both companies have filed confidentially to go public but haven't yet announced their precise plans, and both are valued at around $1 trillion based on their most recent private funding rounds.
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Anthropic management has been meeting with potential investors ahead of an IPO expected in September or October, and there were reports last week that it's targeting a $2 trillion market cap for its debut.
Can Anthropic dethrone SpaceX as the largest IPO ever?
When SpaceX merged with xAI earlier this year, it became a mix of three businesses: rocket launching, satellite broadband, and AI. With a 92% year-over-year increase in sales in the second quarter, it had $23.4 billion in trailing-12-month revenue.
However, only 12% of that second-quarter revenue came from rocket launching. Most of it, or 54%, came from Starlink, or what it calls the connectivity business. AI accounted for nearly 33%, but it was the major growth driver, increasing nearly 250% over last year.
If you're excited about SpaceX because of its space business, you need to understand that's not what's driving the company's growth right now.
Anthropic is a competitor in the AI business. Claude competes with SpaceX's LLM, Grok, and it's one of the most popular LLMs today. Although the public can't access Anthropic's full financials yet, it has released some numbers publicly, and those show that it's growing fast.
In May, Anthropic said that it had achieved a $47 billion run rate. That's well above SpaceX's trailing-12-month revenue but in line with Wall Street's $44.8 billion full-year 2026 estimate. According to Bloomberg, Anthropic's revenue in the second quarter increased 14-fold from the prior-year period to $11.5 billion.
The AI powerhouse has major deals with Amazon and Advanced Micro Devices, and it was reported last week that it's in talks to buy start-up Decart, which operates a platform that helps LLMs run inference workloads more cost-effectively across a variety of chips.
When it debuted, SpaceX was worth $1.77 trillion, and it briefly crossed the $2 trillion threshold before falling back to levels below its IPO price. Today, it's in the $1.9 trillion neighborhood. If Anthropic is already booking larger revenues than SpaceX and growing much faster, it might be able to command a high valuation and convince the market that it's worth more than $2 trillion.
