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genai/news//The Boston Globe
OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, was valued at $730 billion in private markets.
OpenAI is considering a tender offer to let employees sell shares to private investors.
KEY POINTS
Anthropic's revenue could increase by 80 times this year, far surpassing earlier projections.
Anthropic will use all computing power at SpaceX’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis.
None of OpenAI, SpaceX, or Anthropic are profitable, yet all face massive AI infrastructure costs.
An OpenAI public offering would join what is expected to be a wave of blockbuster IPOs, with Elon Musk’s rocket company, SpaceX, and AI startup Anthropic also preparing to go public this year.
OpenAI, which is based in San Francisco, was valued at $730 billion in private markets after a funding round this year. That does not include its latest investment round, which totaled $122 billion.
The company is a long way from being profitable, even after raising more than $180 billion since it was started in 2015. It pulled in more than $13 billion in revenue last year, but expects to spend $115 billion over the next four years. Revenue is rising from the sale of ads inside the consumer version of ChatGPT and the sale of various AI technologies to businesses and independent software developers.
SpaceX, which will be valued at $1.77 trillion, filed for an IPO at the end of last month, saying its revenue soared to $18.7 billion in 2025, up 33 percent from a year earlier. It could list on Wall Street as early as this week.
Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO last week. The startup recently passed OpenAI as the world’s highest-flying AI startup, with $65 billion in new financing that valued it at $900 billion before the inclusion of the new capital. A public offering could happen as soon as this fall.
IPOs from the three companies could unleash an avalanche of wealth and create the world’s first trillionaire in Musk, who owns about 50 percent of SpaceX. And they could unlock millions of dollars for employees of the AI companies, potentially setting off a real estate and investment boom in tech-centric cities such as San Francisco.
But the IPOs, which have been widely anticipated by investors eager to get a piece of the tech industry’s AI craze, come with risks. None of the three companies is believed to be profitable, and all are saddled with enormous costs as they build huge data centers to power their AI systems. Many local communities are also pushing back against the construction of the giant complexes while white-collar workers are increasingly concerned they’re going to lose their jobs to the new technology.
As OpenAI considers when it will go public, it is also working toward a tender offer that would allow employees to sell their shares to private investors, according to a person familiar with the company’s plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity. The company has made similar tender offers in the past.
OpenAI started the AI boom in late 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. The company’s CEO, Sam Altman, became the public face of this new technology as the number of people using the chatbot each month grew to more than 900 million. OpenAI now has more than 5,000 employees, up from 300 when it released ChatGPT.
(The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to AI systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Anthropic, which was founded by former OpenAI employees, is one of OpenAI’s fiercest rivals, along with Google. Anthropic and Google offer technology that is arguably on a par with the GPT technology that underpins OpenAI’s consumer chatbot and its other products.
Anthropic has homed in on business customers and said it had planned to increase its revenues by 10 times this year. That turned out to be an underestimate; now the company says its revenue could increase by 80 times this year. Much of that growth is driven by Claude Code, which can generate computer code and help developers build complex software programs.
On the consumer business side, Google said last month that its chatbot, Gemini, had reached 900 million monthly users. The tech giant also has a built-in advantage: its widely used search engine, which now has AI technology built into it.
SpaceX also has ambitions in AI after merging with Musk’s startup xAI. Anthropic recently said it had reached an agreement to use all the computing power at the rocket company’s Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee. The move gives Anthropic access to more than 220,000 AI chips and opens the door to working with SpaceX to create AI data centers in space.
Last year, OpenAI began building its own computer data centers along with the cloud computing company Oracle and the Japanese conglomerate SoftBank. But when that effort slowed, OpenAI signed big deals to use data centers operated by Amazon and other companies.