A flood of new shares from companies looking to fund their artificial intelligence ambitions is raising questions on Wall Street about whether there will be enough buyers to soak them all up and what this pile of fresh equity will mean for stock prices more broadly.
Initial public offerings from SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI in the coming months could add close to $4 trillion in market capitalization to US exchanges, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Already, the SpaceX deal has drawn more orders than shares available in the filing. Meanwhile, Alphabet Inc. is planing to raise $85 billion next quarter by selling stock, mostly into the open market, a move that could be followed by other technology giants in need of cash for AI data centers.
“This is something that we haven’t seen in such a scale and in such a short time,” said Ano Kuhanathan, head of corporate research at Allianz Trade. “It’s a huge supply event.”
The sellers seemingly have a lot going for them at the moment. AI investments are booming, spurring strong revenue growth. Chipmakers are soaring, with the Philadelphia Stock Exchange Semiconductor Index on pace for its best year since 2003 with an 74% gain. Even old-school tech companies like Cisco Systems Inc., Nokia Oyj and Dell Technologies Inc. have caught a bid from AI enthusiasm.
