AI Weekly Issue #494: SpaceX wants $80 billion. OpenAI wants a trillion.

For nine years the AI boom has been a private bet, priced by a small circle of venture funds and sovereign wealth in rounds most people could never touch. This week it started going public. SpaceX filed an $80 billion IPO prospectus on Wednesday, the largest in history, with a chatbot company and $6.4 billion in AI losses folded inside it. OpenAI is days from filing its own, aiming for a trillion-dollar debut by September. The public markets are about to answer the question private investors kept waving away: at what price?

Quick Hits

GitHub's own source code was stolen, and the break-in started inside an AI lab's supply chain. A group calling itself TeamPCP exfiltrated roughly 3,800 of GitHub's internal repositories after an employee installed a poisoned Nx Console extension that was live on the marketplace for just 18 minutes. The attack chain traces back to compromised Mistral AI npm packages. The Hacker News

Brussels softened its own AI law right as the giants line up to go public. EU negotiators reached a deal to delay the AI Act's high-risk obligations from August 2026 to December 2027, the first rollback since the law passed in 2024. The compliance reprieve arrives exactly as the IPO window opens. European Council

SpaceX filed for an $80 billion IPO, the biggest in market history. The prospectus values the company at $1.7 trillion, lists it on Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX, and consolidates xAI's numbers: a $6.4 billion operating loss last year on $3.2 billion of revenue. Starlink is the only one of its three units that makes money. Fortune

OpenAI is days behind, preparing a confidential filing for a trillion-dollar listing. Working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, OpenAI is targeting a public debut as early as September at a valuation above $1 trillion, up from the $852 billion mark its last private round set in March. CNBC

Nvidia posted another record quarter and the stock fell anyway. Revenue hit $81.6 billion, up 85%, with data-center sales nearly doubling to $75.2 billion. The company raised its dividend and added $80 billion in buybacks. Shares slid after the report, with expectations now running ahead of even record results. Fortune

Google shipped Gemini 3.5 Flash and made it the default the same day. At I/O on Tuesday, Google launched its fastest frontier-tier model, a 24/7 personal agent called Gemini Spark, and a world model named Omni. Gemini 3.5 Flash is now the default in the Gemini app and in AI Mode in Search worldwide. CNBC

KPMG is putting Claude in front of all 276,000 of its employees. Anthropic and KPMG signed a global alliance that embeds Claude into Digital Gateway, the platform KPMG's staff and clients use for tax, legal, and advisory work across 138 countries. Anthropic

A modular data-center startup raised $230 million to build AI compute for remote sites. Armada's Series B, co-led by BlackRock, values it at $2 billion and comes with a deal to mass-produce data-center units at a 400,000-square-foot factory in Arizona. CNBC

Now the market gets a vote

For most of the AI boom, the valuations were set in private. SoftBank, Thrive, sovereign funds, and a handful of crossover investors decided that OpenAI was worth $852 billion and SpaceX was worth $1.7 trillion. No public market ever got the chance to disagree.

That changes now. SpaceX's prospectus is the first time the AI bet has had to show its arithmetic to anyone with a brokerage account, and the arithmetic includes xAI's $6.4 billion operating loss and a combined net loss near $5 billion. OpenAI's filing is timed, openly, to compete with SpaceX for the same pool of capital. Reports say its bankers want investors to set money aside rather than spend it all on the June SpaceX listing.

The backdrop is not gentle. The Shiller P/E ratio sits above 40, higher than it was at the dot-com peak. Nvidia just posted a record quarter and still sold off. Two of the largest IPOs ever are about to test whether public investors will pay private-round prices for companies that lose billions.

The deals themselves will probably price. The bigger question is what happens to every other AI valuation once the public has had its say on these two.

Key Takeaways

AI valuations are about to be repriced by people who can say no. Private rounds only ever ratcheted the numbers up. A public order book sets a clearing price, and it can clear lower.

SpaceX is now an AI company wearing a rocket company's name. xAI's losses, Grok's compute bill, and a plan to scale the model to trillions of parameters are all consolidated into the prospectus investors will be pricing.

The OpenAI and SpaceX filings are a fight for the same dollars. Two trillion-dollar offerings inside one quarter forces institutional investors to choose, and that competition will shape both deals' terms.

If you hold an index fund, you will soon own this trade. Once these companies list and enter the major indices, the AI bet stops being optional for ordinary portfolios.

Worth Reading

TechCrunch: what's actually inside the SpaceX IPO filing — A close read of the prospectus, from xAI's losses to Musk's voting control and the scale of the AI compute bill. The most detailed public look yet at the combined SpaceX-xAI machine.

Axios: OpenAI prepares its IPO filing as SpaceX looms — How OpenAI's filing timing is built around SpaceX's June listing, and why the two are competing for the same pool of investor capital.

Anthropic: widening the conversation on frontier AI — Anthropic, the one large lab not racing to file, on why it is consulting religious, legal, and civic groups about AI's impact. A useful contrast to the IPO sprint.

This week's poll

Two trillion-dollar AI companies are about to test the public markets within weeks of each other. What happens?

Last week, 222 of you voted:

Meta committed $145B to AI infrastructure and laid off 8,000 people the same week. Where does that math go from here?

Productivity catches up to the capex36%

Cuts are real, capex is dressed-up cost-cutting18%

Capex is a bubble; layoffs are independent24%

Both real, both consequences of the same shift22%

See full results →

Two trillion-dollar AI companies are about to test the public markets within weeks of each other. What happens?

Both price strong and the AI rally extends They price, then drift below the IPO mark within months One or both gets delayed as the market wobbles This is the top, and these IPOs mark it

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