SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic IPOs: The “Apollo Moment” of the AI Era Has Arrived

01 This Is Not an IPO — This Is an “Operating System Upgrade” for Human Civilization

In the summer of 2026, the U.S. capital markets will witness an unprecedented “triple convergence” — SpaceX, OpenAI, and anthropic, three AI giants, will knock on Nasdaq’s doors within three months. This is not an ordinary wave of public offerings. It is the first time in human history that three companies with “intelligence” as their core competitiveness will move simultaneously from private shadows into the public spotlight.

$75 billion. That is SpaceX’s Fundraising target alone — 2.5 times larger than the record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019. If all three companies succeed, total U.S. IPO proceeds in 2026 will eASIly surpass the 2021 record of $156 billion — and that year marked the peak of a bubble.

But this time, the Valuation logic is completely different. SpaceX at $1.75 trillion, Anthropic at $900 billion, openai at $852 billion — these numbers are not based on P/E ratios. They rest on a much grander nARRative: whoever DeFines the boundaries of “Intelligence” over the next decade will own the “operating system” of human civilization.

02 The “AI DNA” of the Three Giants: Different Paths, One Intelligent Revolution

Many mistakenly label SpaceX as a “rocket company,” OpenAI as a “chatbot company,” and Anthropic as an “LLM company.” That is as wrong as calling Amazon an “online bookstore.”

SpaceX’s AI ambition lies in the fusion of Starlink and xAI. After acquiring xAI in 2025, Elon Musk is building a “space-ground-terminal” triadic intelligent network. Starlink’s 45,000 satellites are not merely communication nodes — they are a “space-based compute field” for distributed AI. While OpenAI and Anthropic are still racing for GPUs in terrestrial data centers, SpaceX is already planning orbital data centers — in the vacuum and extreme cold of space, AI computing powered by solar energy will completely break free from Earth’s energy and cooling constraints.

Even more formidable: SpaceX’s rocket reusability has reduced launch costs per kilogram to one-tenth of traditional aerospace. Soon, launching an AI Compute satellite may cost less than renting a server room inside Beijing’s 5th Ring Road. When AI “brains” can be deployed in space, all the headaches of terrestrial AI — Data Sovereignty, compute monopolies, energy bottlenecks — will be redefined.

OpenAI’s bet is the religion of artificial general intelligence (AGI). Sam Altman’s narrative has never been just a product — it is a creed: “We Stand on the threshold of creating superintelligence.” GPT-5, Codex, Sora — their commercialization is merely fundraising for the real goal: achieving AGI by 2030. But the price is staggering: OpenAI expects it needs to invest about $600 billion cumulatively by 2030 to become profitable. Every dollar raised from its IPO will be thrown into a “Holy Grail of intelligence” that may never materialize.

Anthropic’s differentiation lies in balancing safety and profitability. When Dario Amodei left OpenAI, he took not just a team but a philosophy: AI Development must be controllable, interpretable, and beneficial to humanity. In May 2026, Anthropic achieved its first quarterly profit, with Annualized Revenue exceeding $47 billion — unique among the three. Though less known than ChatGPT among the General public, the claude Series Has built a strong technical reputation in enterprise markets, code generation, and complex reasoning tasks.

Three companies, three paths: SpaceX takes the hard-tech route of “physical infrastructure + AI”; OpenAI pursues a radical “faith-driven + brute-force scaling” path; Anthropic follows a pRAGmatic “safety-first + commercially sound” APProach. But all converge on the Same endgame: defining the next generation of intelligence infrastructure.

03 Who Will Become Humanity’s First $10 Trillion Company?

This is a brutal prediction game, but we can analyze from three dimensions:

1. Ceiling: SpaceX’s “Space OS” Has No Upper Limit

If SpaceX successfully creates a closed loop of “space-based compute + Starlink communications + ground terminals,” it will no longer be just a company — it will become humanity’s first “interplanetary infrastructure operator.” Its $1.75 trillion valuation is based only on existing rockets and Starlink. If Orbital Data Centers and space-based AI computing become reality, its market cap ceiling will far exceed any terrestrial company — because space has no competitors; the lAWS of physics are its moat.

Probability of SpaceX becoming the first $10 trillion company: 40%. Prerequisites: Starlink surpasses 500 million users, orbital data centers are commercialized by 2028, and Martian communication networks begin construction. Any milestone will trigger exponential valuation jumps.

2. Certainty: Anthropic’s “Profit Flywheel” Is Most Solid

Among the three, Anthropic is the only one that has proven AI can make money. $47 billion in annualized revenue, quarterly profit, deep penetration in enterprise markets — these numbers give investors a “calculable return model.” If Anthropic can push annual revenue to $200 billion by 2028 while maintaining 30%+ profit margins, its market cap exceeding $3 trillion is highly probable.

But Anthropic’s bottleneck is that its “safety narrative” may limit commercial aggressiveness. While OpenAI and SpaceX push boundaries, Anthropic’s conservatism might cause it to miss explosive opportunities.

Probability of Anthropic becoming the first $10 trillion company: 20%. It must prove that safe AI can also be the most commercially successful AI.

3. Explosiveness: OpenAI’s “AGI Faith” Is the Biggest Variable

OpenAI’s valuation logic rests on a “non-Linear explosion” assumption. If AGI is truly achieved between 2028 and 2030, OpenAI’s market cap will not grow linearly — it will jump discontinuously from trillions to tens of trillions. But conversely, if AGI progress continues to disappoint, or if a major safety incident occurs (e.g., an AI system失控 causing a public crisis), OpenAI’s valuation could collapse.

Probability of OpenAI becoming the first $10 trillion company: 35%. Its path is the steepest, but its CLIff is also the deepest.

Our Verdict: SpaceX is the most likely to become the first $10 trillion company. Not because its AI technology is the most advanced, but because its business model is the most irreplaceable. OpenAI and Anthropic’s AI capabilities can theoretically be copied, open-sourced, or surpassed (as DeepSeek has shown). But SpaceX’s rocket reusability, Starlink’s orbital occupancy, and physical monopoly over space infrastructure — these are non-replicable assets built with time and capital.

In the AI era, “compute” is oil, but “compute infrastructure” is the oil field. SpaceX is not monopolizing the oil — it’s monopolizing the entire oil field.

04 Who Is “Greater”? A Question at Civilizational Scale

“Greatness” is a dangerous word, but at this historic juncture, we must ask.

If “greatness” means changing the boundaries of human survival, SpaceX wins. It has taken the substantive step of turning humanity from a single-planet species into a multi-planet species. Starlink brings high-speed internet to rEMOte areas for the first time; rocket reusability turns Space Exploration from a state ACTivity into a commercial one. If humanity truly builds a Mars base by 2050, SpaceX will be the “first mover” of this civilizational leap.

If “greatness” means redefining intelligence itself, OpenAI wins. Achieving AGI will touch the deepest questions of human existence: What is consciousness? What is creativity? What is value? If OpenAI creates intelligence surpassing humans, its impact will rival the discovery of fire, the invention of writing, the Industrial Revolution — a paradigm shift at the civilizational level.

If “greatness” means making Technology serve humans rather than enslave them, Anthropic wins. In the frenzy of the AI Arms race, Anthropic is the rare company insisting on “safety first.” Its constitutional AI Framework tries to embed human values into LLMs during training. If AI does bring massive social risks in the future, humanity may look back with gratitude at Anthropic’s “slow work” done in the 2020s.

Our Answer: SpaceX is greater. Not because Elon Musk is smarter than Sam altman or Dario Amodei, but because SpaceX solves physical-world bottlenecks, while OpenAI and Anthropic solve Information-world bottlenecks. In humanity’s priority ranking, physical bottlenecks (energy, space, survival) will always outrank information bottlenecks (efficiency, entertainment, knowledge). Without SpaceX’s space infrastructure, OpenAI and Anthropic’s AI compute will eventually hit Earth’s physical limits of energy and heat dissipation. But without OpenAI’s chatgpt, humanity can still survive.

SpaceX’s greatness lies in providing the “physical foundation” for the AI age — a foundation that no other AI company can build for itself.

05 Implications for China: Are We Ready for the “AI infrastructure Era”?

The IPOs of these three companies serve as both a mirror and a wake-up call for China’s AI industry.

Lesson 1: The integration of “AI + hard tech” is the ultimate moat.

Most Chinese AI companies remain at the “model layer” and “application layer” — chatbots, Text-to-Image, smart customer service. These fields have fast iteration but shallow moats. DeepSeek has proven China’s strength in algorithmic efficiency, yet DeepSeek still relies on NVIDIA GPUs and terrestrial Data Centers.

SpaceX’s model shows that true monopoly happens at the physical layer. China needs its own “space-based AI Infrastructure” — low-orbit satellite constellations, Orbital Compute nodes, integrated space-ground communication networks. This is not optional; it is existential. If the main battlefield for AI compute moves to space and China falls behind in space infrastructure, all its terrestrial AI advantages will be “decisively outmaneuvered.”

Lesson 2: From “application innovation” to “faith-driven innovation.”

OpenAI’s valuation rests largely on “AGI faith.” That faith is not marketing spin — it is the core driver of organizational capability. It allows OpenAI to endure tens of billions in annual losses, attract the world’s top AI talent, and sustain a decade-long “moonshot.”

Chinese tech companies often excel at “fast Monetization” and “business Model Innovation,” but lack a culture of “long-term faith-driven” organization. China needs its own “AGI faith” — not blindly copying OpenAI, but finding its own ultimate mission for the AI era. Is it “AI for science”? “AI for Manufacturing”? Or “AI for the Common Good”? Companies without faith do business; companies with faith build civilization.

Lesson 3: Balancing safety and commerce requires institutional innovation.

Anthropic’s Constitutional AI and quarterly profit prove one thing: AI safety is not the enemy of commercialization — it is the prerequisite. China is at the global forefront of LLM regulation (record-filing systems, content moderation, algorithmic recommendation management), but its regulatory logic remains “risk prevention” rather than “value guidance.”

We must consider: how can Chinese AI companies embed “human-centric” technology ethics while pursuing commercial success? This requires not just corporate conscience but institutional design — for example, making AI Safety Investment a bonus factor in IPO reviews, creating “AI ethics innovation funds,” or mandating “AI social impact assessments.” Turning safety from a cost into a competitive advantage — that is Anthropic’s most important lesson for Chinese regulators.

Lesson 4: Patient capital needs to be nurtured.

SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic could sustain more than a decade of private-market fundraising thanks to U.S. capital markets’ tolerance for “long-term losses, long-term vision.” While China’s STAR Market has opened a channel for hard tech, investor psychology still revolves around “three years without profit spells anxiety.”

The construction cycle of AI infrastructure may be ten or even twenty years. If China’s capital markets cannot cultivate patient capital, its AI giants will remain stuck at the application layer — because the infrastructure layer demands too much time, too much money, and too much risk.

06 Conclusion: We Stand on the Eve of the Singularity

That summer of 2026 — when SpaceX’s bell rings on Nasdaq, and when OpenAI and Anthropic file their prospectuses one after another — we will not be witnessing three companies going public. We will be witnessing the pressing of a button that switches eras.

Before this moment, AI was papers in labs, toys for Silicon Valley geeks, gambles for VCs. After this moment, AI becomes a public asset, a matter of national competitiveness, the new operating system of human civilization.

Among the three, SpaceX is most likely to become the first $10 trillion company, because it monopolizes the physical foundation of the AI age. And SpaceX may also be the “greatest,” because it is pushing humanity from planetary imprisonment toward an interstellar species.

For China, the IPOs of these three companies are a strategic lesson worth trillions of dollars: The endgame of AI lies not in models, but in infrastructure; not in algorithms, but in faith; not in speed, but in safety.