AI IPO queue tightens

OpenAI is talking about letting ordinary investors into its initial public offering instead of keeping the hottest shares almost entirely with big funds and wealthy clients. Reuters reported on April 8 that Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said the company would reserve a portion of any future initial public offering for retail investors. (reuters.com) That sounds simple until you put it next to the rest of the artificial intelligence market. Reuters also reported on April 8 that Anthropic has cut into OpenAI’s lead in annualized revenue, which means two of the biggest model makers could arrive at public markets with similar growth stories at roughly the same time. (reuters.com) An initial public offering is the moment a private company starts selling stock on a public exchange. If several giant artificial intelligence companies line up for that moment together, they are all asking the same pool of buyers to write very large checks in the same season. (investor.gov) (reuters.com) That pool is not infinite, even in a boom. CoreWeave’s March 2025 debut was one of the first big artificial intelligence listings to test demand, and Reuters reported that the cloud company priced below its marketed range after cutting the size of the deal. (reuters.com) Private investors have been valuing these companies as if public buyers will eventually pay even more. OpenAI said in October 2024 that it had raised $6.6 billion at a $157 billion valuation, while Reuters reported in December 2025 that Databricks raised more than $4 billion at a $134 billion valuation without going public. (openai.com) (reuters.com) OpenAI also spent 2025 rebuilding itself into a form that looks more like a company public investors can understand. The company said its for-profit business became a public benefit corporation called OpenAI Group PBC, while the OpenAI Foundation kept control of the group. (openai.com 1) (openai.com 2) That structure matters because public investors usually want ordinary shares, clear governance, and a clean claim on future profits. OpenAI said in December 2024 that the goal of the shift to a Delaware public benefit corporation was to create ordinary shares of stock while keeping the mission written into the company’s legal design. (openai.com) Anthropic’s side of the race is simpler to explain: revenue is catching up fast enough to make it look less like a distant number two and more like a second flagship listing. Reuters framed that narrowing gap as a key reason investors are starting to think about not one artificial intelligence initial public offering, but a queue. (reuters.com) If OpenAI really does carve out shares for retail buyers, that could spread access wider than a normal blockbuster listing. It also means a deal that might already be competing with Anthropic, Databricks, CoreWeave-style infrastructure names, and other late-stage artificial intelligence paper would be trying to satisfy both institutions and small investors at once. (reuters.com 1) (reuters.com 2) That is why the risk is not that nobody wants artificial intelligence stocks. The risk is that too many companies with triple-digit private valuations, huge computing bills, and overlapping investor bases try to go public close together, and the market starts treating them less like miracles and more like substitutes. (reuters.com 1) (reuters.com 2)