What Happened
The IPO market has abruptly slowed, with a growing list of companies postponing or abandoning planned public offerings.
Here is just a partial list: Holtec, Oura, SB Energy, Bamboo Insurance, and EG Group, all of which have delayed their US listings. In Australia, Nvidia-backed AI data center operator Firmus just scrapped a planned $5 billion IPO that would have valued the company at roughly $30 billion.
This has come as a huge surprise to many observers, who noisily predicted a torrent of IPOs would come to market after SpaceX, and before the main events: OpenAI and Anthropic.
What It Means
News reports wrongly, we think, attribute the slowdown to weakening investor demand, excessive valuations, and growing skepticism about AI.
The right answer is in something we have been writing here for months, and even created a tool to model: the mega-IPO flow and its consequences. Or as one banker told the FT, “Right now no one cares about anything that isn’t Anthropic.”
Anthropic and OpenAI are, in size, historically unprecedented IPOs. With Anthropic reportedly targeting a valuation above $2 trillion and OpenAI potentially following with another enormous offering, institutional investors are reserving capital, managing exposure, and waiting for the two transactions that will define the AI market.
The capital market effect is to suppress everything else. Smaller, more speculative companies are unable to attract attention or get the valuations they want. Issuance slows. Bankers (and journalists) interpret the slowdown as deteriorating sentiment. Both are wrong.