The company recently filed its S-1 with the SEC, targeting a valuation of $1.75 trillion and a capital raise of up to $75 billion. Some believe its valuation could rise to $2 trillion after the IPO. In its wake, Anthropic (Claude) and OpenAI (ChatGPT) confidentially submitted IPO registration statements to the SEC. Expectations are that both AI model companies will enter the market within the next 3 to 6 months, with rumored valuations approaching or exceeding $1 trillion each. Stripe, the quickly growing payments company, is rumored to be on the IPO docket as well, with a valuation that could exceed $150 billion. Consequently, the coming IPO boom will have wide-reaching impacts.

The IPO market, which has been stagnant for the last four years, is bubbling with excitement. The headlines surrounding the IPOs are hyperbolic, banker fees are enormous, and social media is teeming with bullish sentiment on how high the new shares may trade after going public.

While IPO boom talk is great for clickbait, nobody is asking the most important question. Where will the money come from?

Putting Context To The IPO Boom

To understand the size of the coming IPO boom, some historical context is necessary. Prior to the pandemic, the US IPO market raised approximately $30 billion per year. In late 2020 and throughout 2021, the SPAC boom led to a surge in IPO offerings. Since then, however, as we share below, IPO issuance has been relatively lean.

The 2026 pipeline is shaping up to be the second-largest in at least the last ten years. SpaceX alone is raising up to $75 billion per its SEC filing. Add OpenAI's expected cash raise of $60 billion, Anthropic at $15 to $20 billion, and Stripe around $10 billion, and the pipeline of known IPOs coming to market is approximately $160-$165 billion. Moreover, the total market valuation of these deals could surpass $4 trillion. Assuming no other deals come onto the market, the four deals would be larger than the last four years' worth of deals combined.  

Dilution vs. Capital Absorption

Some pundits are using the word "dilution" to describe the impact of the IPOs on the market. While not necessarily misused, the term is most often used to describe what happens when a publicly traded company issues new shares in the market, diluting the value of existing shares. Simply, existing shareholders who do not buy new shares see their ownership percentage decline.

Given that the expected stock offerings are IPOs rather than add-on offerings by a publicly traded company, the term "dilution" is not appropriate to describe the upcoming offerings. The more accurate term is capital absorption.

Capital absorption is the process by which large new stock offerings pull money out of existing financial markets, as investors sell existing holdings or redirect cash to purchase newly issued shares. While it is true that someone must buy the shares being sold to fund an IPO purchase, that buyer, in most cases, is simply recycling existing market capital rather than introducing new money. Thus, while an IPO is not dilutive to the stock being offered, it is dilutive to the financial markets, as the total investible dollars, in theory, remain unchanged; they just get spread out a little more thinly.