• The AI IPO era faces its first test this week as SpaceX prices a record listing into a whipsawing market, with OpenAI and Anthropic filings queued behind it.
• Asia’s data centre expansion leans on AI capex that public markets are about to reprice daily, and the next 48 hours offer the first verdict.

The AI IPO era gets its first verdict this week. SpaceX’s share sale is set for as early as today (June 11, 2026), with trading targeted for June 12, pricing the largest listing ever attempted into a market that cannot decide whether it loves the AI trade or fears it. A successful debut at the roughly US$1.75 trillion target would put SpaceX past the record set by Saudi Aramco in 2019 and make it the first company to list on a US exchange already worth more than US$1 trillion. 

It is the front of a remarkable queue. OpenAI filed confidentially for a listing on Monday, the third major AI developer to file, behind a queue of listings collectively valued at around US$3.6 trillion. Anthropic’s funding round last month priced it at US$965 billion; OpenAI’s March round put it at US$852 billion, and Anthropic’s confidential filing landed on June 1. 

OpenAI announced its move with unusual candour: “We expect it to leak, so we’re just announcing it,” the company said, adding that timing remains undecided because “there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company”.

SpaceX’s place in an AI listing queue warrants an explanation. The rocket company absorbed Musk’s xAI in a February all-stock deal that valued the combined entity at US$1.25 trillion, a merger without precedent in scale, taking on the Grok models and xAI’s losses in a single transaction. 

Its prospectus claims ownership of “the largest AI training data centre clusters on Earth”, and the unit is already a revenue machine on paper: Anthropic’s compute contract runs at US$1.25 billion a month through 2029, and a newly signed Google cloud deal worth US$920 million monthly brings contracted future revenue from those two customers alone to about US$75 billion. 

The sceptics’ case is that the AI label is doing valuation work: the filing shows Starlink as the profit engine while the combined company posted a US$1.94 billion operating loss on US$4.69 billion in first-quarter revenue. 

The AI IPO meets a market that can’t make up its mind

Whatever the prospectus says, the tape this week is hostile territory. On Tuesday, the Nasdaq opened in the green, was down more than 3.6% within the session, then clawed most of it back to finish off 0.97%. The S&P 500 traced the same shape, off more than 2.2% at the lows before closing down just 0.26%. Both indices remain up for the year, but sit roughly 3% and 5% below the record highs set on June 2. 

The violence concentrates exactly where the AI IPO class draws its valuation logic. Micron’s week tells the story: down 13.3% on Friday, up 9.9% Monday, then from a 4.2% gain to a 7.6% loss within Tuesday’s session. This is the same Micron that joined the trillion-dollar club in late May after months of near-vertical gains, while SanDisk has risen more than 600% over the past 12 months on NAND flash shortages driven by AI demand. 

A market repricing its conviction by double digits within single sessions is being asked to absorb the biggest listings ever attempted, against a backdrop of US inflation topping 4% for the first time in three years.

The bulls read the turbulence as noise. “A lot of the sell-off from our perspective is an opportunity to buy some really essential, critical AI infrastructure stocks at cheaper prices,” said Rob Thummel, portfolio manager at Tortoise Capital. He may be right. The point is that three companies seeking trillions in combined valuation are about to find out in public, and the first answer arrives within days. 

Asia’s buildout is priced on the answer

Here’s why this matters in Johor and Cyberjaya. The data centres going up across the region are built for customers, and the biggest customers fall into two camps. The first is the hyperscalers, the likes of Microsoft and Google, which pay fortheir expansion out of profits. A rough week on the Nasdaq doesn’t change their plans. 

The second camp is the AI labs themselves, and they have no profits. Every gigawatt they book is paid for with money raised from investors at enormous valuations. Going public changes how that money behaves. A private backer commits for years and waits. A public shareholder watches every quarter and can sell tomorrow. So once these companies list, the spending that fills Asia’s data centres gets judged in real time, by a market that this week couldn’t hold an opinion from breakfast to closing bell. 

If the debuts go well, the buildout the region is banking on keeps rolling. If they go badly, the labs feel it first, and the construction pipeline feels it next. The region isn’t just hosting this bet; it has money in it too. SoftBank is deep in OpenAI, and sovereign funds across Asia will be offered allocations in the biggest listings ever sold. 

Their dilemma is plain enough: buy the AI trade at record prices just as it learns to wobble, or watch the decade’s defining listings happen without them. OpenAI, notably, is keeping its own exit flexible. “It may be a while,” the company said of its debut. By Friday, SpaceX’s first prints will tell us whether that caution was wisdom or a missed window.

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