After more than a decade of favouring deep private funding, a new wave of Silicon Valley's most powerful companies is quietly preparing for a seismic shift towards the public markets. Giants in artificial intelligence and space exploration, including OpenAI, SpaceX, and Anthropic, are now laying the groundwork for potential blockbuster initial public offerings (IPOs), with 2026 emerging as a plausible horizon for these landmark events.
The AI Capital Crunch: Why Private Funding Isn't Enough
The immense financial demands of developing cutting-edge AI are forcing even the best-funded labs to reconsider their long-term capital strategy. Anthropic, the AI firm backed by Amazon, has taken concrete steps by hiring the law firm Wilson Sonsini to advise on public-market readiness. While the company calls this prudent housekeeping, the move is highly significant.
Training new AI models now requires multibillion-dollar commitments for computing power, energy, and cloud contracts. This creates a fundamental tension between the flexibility of private ownership and the need for a permanent, sustainable capital structure. Anthropic's latest funding round valued it at over $300 billion, but maintaining that trajectory requires financing that does not become progressively more restrictive.
OpenAI finds itself in a similarly challenging position. Reports suggest it is preparing for a potential IPO in the second half of 2026, with a valuation that could approach a staggering $1 trillion. Publicly, CEO Sam Altman has questioned whether the scrutiny of public markets suits a mission-driven organisation. However, the company's own forecasts reveal the strain: while revenues are growing rapidly, so are long-term, multi-year obligations for chips and data centres, making the question of sustainable funding impossible to ignore.
SpaceX and the Starlink Factor: A Business Transformed
If OpenAI exemplifies the financial strain of AI, SpaceX demonstrates the practical limits of remaining private at an immense scale. Reports indicate Elon Musk's space venture could list as early as mid-to-late 2026, with a potential valuation of up to $1.5 trillion.
A key driver is the transformation of SpaceX's business model. Around 70% of its revenue now comes from Starlink, its satellite broadband division. With millions of subscribers and a recurring revenue stream, Starlink increasingly resembles a global telecoms operator—a business profile far more familiar and attractive to public-market investors than the capital-intensive unpredictability of space launch alone.
However, a successful listing at such a valuation would require investor confidence not just in Starlink's growth, but in SpaceX's ability to execute on its Starship programme and maintain its technological lead amidst accelerating global competition, particularly from China.
The Quieter Contenders: Databricks and Canva's Methodical March
Beyond the headline-grabbing AI and space firms, a second tier of late-stage tech companies appears to be on a more conventional and predictable path to the public markets. Databricks, a critical player in the data and AI software stack, is now generating more than $4 billion in annualised revenue and is cash-flow positive. Its CEO, Ali Ghodsi, has openly stated that a public listing is the "natural outcome" for a business of its scale.
Similarly, the design platform Canva has conducted a methodical pre-IPO campaign. With over 250 million monthly users, it has expanded its enterprise offerings, conducted internal share sales for employee liquidity, and hired senior finance executives with public-market experience. Both companies represent a different proposition: their revenues are recurring, capital needs are more manageable, and their business models are already well-understood by investors.
This growing momentum suggests that if the IPO window reopens in earnest, it may be these steadier names that test the waters first, paving the way for the unprecedented listings of the AI labs and space pioneers that could redefine the public market landscape by the end of 2026.
