OpenAI, SpaceX and Anthropic have a combined valuation approaching India's GDP — will this trigger a bubble?

The U.S. capital market is about to witness the largest wave of technology listings in recent years.

On June 8, OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, announced externally that it had secretly submitted an application for an initial public offering (IPO) in the United States, becoming another AI giant after Anthropic to officially initiate the listing process.

Meanwhile, SpaceX is also widely believed to be preparing for a public listing, with an expected listing in the second half of the year. These three companies represent the top players in the fields of generative AI, enterprise-level large models, and commercial space. Their valuation scales have each reached or are close to the level of trillions of dollars.

Although these three companies are extremely outstanding technology leaders globally and are in industries with great potential, the successive large-scale fundraisings have also raised concerns in the capital market. There is a worry that the "curse" of industry giants going public accompanied by the bursting of bubbles in the past may repeat itself.

01

The combined valuation of the three companies is approaching India's GDP

According to recent public financing and market documents, after completing a new round of financing at the end of May, Anthropic's valuation reached $965 billion, making it one of the most highly valued AI unicorns at present. The scale of this round of financing was approximately $65 billion.

As Anthropic's most direct competitor, after completing a new round of financing in March this year, OpenAI's post-investment valuation reached $852 billion. The company then received more than $120 billion in committed capital, further consolidating its leading position in the AI industry.

Meanwhile, SpaceX, led by Elon Musk, is widely believed by the market to be likely to go public with a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $1.8 trillion. Some market analyses even give an expectation close to $2 trillion.

Based on the current market valuations, the combined value of the three companies is nearly $3.7 trillion. Compared with the annual economic output of various countries, it is already close to the total GDP of India (about $3.87 trillion), the world's sixth-largest economy in 2025.

02

OpenAI: Leading in user scale, but still facing profit pressure

Looking at these companies separately, OpenAI still maintains a significant leading advantage in the consumer market. The market generally expects that OpenAI may be listed on the capital market as early as the second half of this year.

According to recently disclosed data, the weekly active users of ChatGPT, a generative AI product under OpenAI, have exceeded 900 million, and OpenAI's monthly revenue has reached approximately $2 billion.

One of the important reasons why the capital market is optimistic about OpenAI is its user base and ecological influence. In the past year, OpenAI has continuously expanded its product line, including enterprise services, developer tools, AI agents, and video generation products, hoping to develop ChatGPT from a single chatbot into a comprehensive AI platform.

However, high growth has not completely eliminated investors' concerns about profitability. Market research institutions estimate that OpenAI's revenue in 2025 is about $13.1 billion. However, due to the huge costs of model training, data center construction, and computing power procurement, the company is still in a loss-making state. Some analyses predict that its loss scale in 2026 may reach about $14 billion.

03

Anthropic: The fastest-growing AI company in the enterprise market

If OpenAI dominates the consumer market, then Anthropic has rapidly risen in the enterprise-level market with its Claude series of models.

According to Reuters, the subscription scale of Anthropic's enterprise customers increased significantly in 2026. At the end of May, the company claimed that its annualized revenue run rate had reached approximately $47 billion. The popularization of development tools such as Claude Code has also helped Anthropic gain more shares in the software development and enterprise automation markets.

Compared with OpenAI, Anthropic has always emphasized AI safety and risk control. Recently, Anthropic even publicly called on the world to slow down the development speed of cutting-edge AI models, which has sparked industry disputes.

However, the capital market still gives Anthropic a very high valuation. In February this year, its valuation reached $380 billion. Just a few months later, a new round of financing pushed the valuation up to $965 billion, achieving nearly a threefold increase.

04

SpaceX: Another trillion-dollar track outside of AI

Different from OpenAI and Anthropic, SpaceX's core business is not artificial intelligence. However, since its sister company xAI was incorporated, SpaceX has also transformed into a computing power provider and is highly involved in the development of the AI industry.

Currently, with the continuous expansion of the Starlink satellite internet business and the increasing market share of rocket launches, SpaceX has also become one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world.

The market expects that SpaceX's IPO valuation will be between $1.5 trillion and $1.8 trillion, and the financing scale may reach $75 billion to $80 billion, which is expected to be one of the largest IPOs in history.

Data shows that SpaceX's revenue in 2025 was approximately $18.7 billion, mainly from Starlink subscription services, commercial launch services, and government contracts. However, its loss situation is also quite serious. In 2025, it lost $4.94 billion, and in the first quarter of 2026, the net loss was $4.3 billion, with a cumulative loss of $41.3 billion.

However, in the view of many institutions, SpaceX is still an excellent aerospace company and a platform company that controls global communication infrastructure, with unlimited potential.

05

The valuation limit in the AI era

Therefore, from OpenAI to Anthropic and then to SpaceX, the common feature of these three companies is that their valuations are far ahead of their current profit levels. Some analyses believe that the valuation multiples given by the market to these companies are significantly higher than those of traditional technology companies.

For example, Aswath Damodaran, a professor at New York University and known as the "father of valuation," recently expressed doubts about the forecasts of the future market scale of some technology companies. He believes that some expectations have approached or even exceeded a reasonable range. For example, SpaceX's valuation should be $1.3 trillion, rather than up to $1.8 trillion.

In the next few months, as Anthropic and OpenAI advance their IPO processes and SpaceX may initiate a listing plan, investors will for the first time use real money to price the three most important unlisted technology companies in the AI era.

Regardless of the final result, OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX may determine the technological industry landscape in the next decade.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Guanwang Finance", author: Wan Zhaosheng, editor: Zhang Guangkai. Republished by 36Kr with authorization.