‘The Largest IPO Ever, Surpassing SpaceX’: Anthropic Is Up Next
Morningstar's top markets editor is calling the upcoming Anthropic IPO the biggest in history, and two familiar stocks are already pricing in the outcome before a single share lists.
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2026 has reignited the IPO pipeline. Morningstar’s chief global markets editor Tom Lauricella told listeners this month that the coming Anthropic IPO will “likely be the largest IPO ever, surpassing SpaceX which is currently the largest IPO by a wide margin.” He also warned that these deals become “must own stocks for a lot of institutional investors” even with “brand new business models” and unproven monetization. The two public companies with the most direct exposure to Anthropic’s outcome are familiar names: Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL | GOOGL Price Prediction) and Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN).
SpaceX Is the Cautionary Data Point
SpaceX (NASDAQ:SPCX) opened at roughly $150 on June 12 and spiked to $225.64 four days later. As of this morning, SPCX traded at $147.64, down 8.27% from its first-day close of $160.95 and well below its peak. The round trip took about three months. That is the “must-own” template Anthropic is walking into.
Why GOOGL and AMZN Are the Cleanest Proxies
Anthropic’s mark-to-market has already reshaped both companies’ income statements. Amazon disclosed that Q2 FY2026 “net income includes non-operating pre-tax other income of $53.4 billion, primarily from investments in Anthropic”, pushing reported net income to $62.65B, up 244.9% YoY. Alphabet reported Q2 net income of $112.11 billion, inflated by a $99.03 billion equity securities gain tied largely to the Anthropic markup.
The operating linkage is just as tight. Amazon built Project Rainier with more than 500,000 AWS Trainium2 AI chips for Claude training, and Anthropic has committed to up to 5 GW of current and future Trainium capacity. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told analysts that Anthropic and OpenAI are “the two leading AI labs in the world,” making “multi-year, multi-gigawatt commitments to Trainium”. Google Cloud, meanwhile, accelerated to 82% growth at $24.77B in Q2, with Anthropic as a marquee customer.
Must-Own Means Passive Money at Any Price
Alphabet has raised roughly $70B in combined equity and debt to fund AI capex, suspended buybacks, and posted negative free cash flow of -$5.86B in Q2 2026. Amazon guided to ~$200 billion in capex in 2026. Lauricella cautions that as AI issuers pile in, semiconductors alone now sit near 16% of the US stock market, and value indexes have subtly drifted to roughly 20% technology stocks.
Invesco QQQ (NASDAQ:QQQ) currently holds 4.02% in Amazon and combined Alphabet share classes near 6.29%. A must-own Anthropic listing at any price would tilt that concentration further, while GOOGL and AMZN holders own the setup twice: once through the stake gains, and again through index exposure. Riding the mania is fine if you time the exit, which is the whole point of our free bubble survivor’s handbook.
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Gerelyn Terzo is the author of dividend investing handbook "Dividend Investing Strategies: How to Have Your Cake & Eat It Too." A veteran financial journalist, she covers agri-finance for outlets like Global AgInvesting and the broader stock market and personal finance for 24/7 Wall Street. She began at CNBC and later helped launch Fox Business in New York. Gerelyn currently resides in Woodland Park, Colorado and dabbles in nature photography as a hobby.
