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As AI companies race to go public, who else is along for the ride?

SpaceX just pulled off the largest IPO in history, pricing shares at $135 and minting Elon Musk as the world's first trillionaire. But the real story isn't the headline number — it's what comes next. As AI companies race to go public, who else is along for the ride? The answer has serious implications for developers and founders across Asia who are building on top of the same wave that's about to crash into public markets.

What Happened

SpaceX officially went public this week in what TechCrunch called the largest IPO ever, and the market reaction was predictably enormous. But SpaceX isn't just a rocket company anymore. Its IPO filing leaned hard into the company's AI ambitions — positioning it as an AI and infrastructure play as much as an aerospace one. That framing matters, because it set a template that other companies are now rushing to follow.

OpenAI and Anthropic have both filed confidentially to go public, according to reporting from TechCrunch's Equity podcast. These aren't distant rumors — both filings happened within weeks of SpaceX's debut. On the podcast, host Sean O'Kane put it bluntly: "My eye is really on these other tech companies that will go public and how much they will try to emulate" what SpaceX has done.

What SpaceX has done, specifically, is stress-test the boundaries of how a public company can operate — concentrated control under one founder, a sprawling business that spans hardware, software, and now AI — and gotten away with it spectacularly. The market rewarded the structure. That sends a clear signal to every late-stage AI startup sitting on a confidential S-1: the window is open, and investors are hungry.

Beyond the headline names, Kirsten Korosec noted on the podcast that a ripple effect is already spreading through the startup ecosystem. Other companies are raising money specifically to "ride that SpaceX IPO wave" — for example, by pitching orbital data centers after SpaceX helped popularize the concept. The SpaceX IPO isn't just a liquidity event for its investors. It's a market-sentiment catalyst that's reshaping what founders think they can pitch and what investors think they should fund.

The window for AI IPOs feels real right now. Whether it stays open long enough for OpenAI and Anthropic to get through it — and whether their businesses can survive the scrutiny of quarterly earnings — is a different question entirely.

Why It Matters for Asia

Asia's relationship with this IPO wave is more complicated than it might look from the outside. On one hand, Asian institutional investors — sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, and large family offices from Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and the Gulf — have been significant backers of the U.S. AI ecosystem. When OpenAI or Anthropic go public, a meaningful chunk of the money flowing in will have an Asian return address. These markets are deeply intertwined.

On the other hand, the IPO wave is primarily a U.S. story, and that asymmetry matters for Asia tech. The capital and narrative gravity is pulling toward a handful of American AI giants. That concentration creates a risk: that the global AI infrastructure layer — the models, the APIs, the data pipelines — gets locked up inside a small number of U.S. public companies whose primary obligation is now to quarterly earnings and American shareholders.

For founders building in Southeast Asia, India, Japan, or Korea, this is a structural challenge. Dependence on U.S.-listed AI platforms means exposure to pricing changes, API deprecations, and policy decisions made in San Francisco boardrooms. The more dominant OpenAI and Anthropic become as public companies optimizing for margin, the more pressure there is on Asian startups to either pay up or find alternatives.

There's also a talent and capital dynamic at play. When U.S. AI companies go public, they generate liquidity for early employees and investors, some of whom will redeploy that capital into new ventures. Historically, a portion of that recycled capital has found its way to Asia — funding the next generation of startups. The SpaceX IPO and the AI IPO wave that follows could trigger a fresh cycle of that redistribution, and Asia's startup ecosystems should be positioned to capture it.

The smarter Asian founders aren't watching this wave from the shore. They're asking: which infrastructure do I control, and which am I renting from a company that just became accountable to public markets?

What This Means for Developers

For developers, the AI IPO wave creates both opportunity and risk — and the two are closer together than they appear.

The opportunity is real. When AI companies go public, they typically accelerate product development to justify their valuations. That means more models, more APIs, more integrations, and more developer tooling shipped faster. The competitive pressure between OpenAI and Anthropic — now amplified by public market scrutiny — will likely produce better, cheaper models over the next 12 to 24 months. Developers who know how to build on top of these systems will have more raw capability at their disposal than at any point in history.

But the risk is just as real. Public companies optimize for revenue. That means the era of subsidized API pricing — where foundation model companies were effectively paying developers to build on their platforms — is ending. OpenAI and Anthropic will need to show margin improvement to satisfy public market investors. Pricing will go up. Rate limits will tighten. Features that were free will become paid. Developers who built deep integrations on a single provider's stack are now exposed to a business risk they didn't fully price in when they made that architectural decision.

The practical response for any developer building AI-powered products right now is to design for portability. That means abstracting your model calls behind a consistent interface, so you can swap providers without rewriting application logic. It means understanding which parts of your stack are genuinely differentiated — your data, your prompting strategy, your domain-specific fine-tuning — versus which parts are commodity infrastructure that you shouldn't be locked into.

It also means paying attention to the Asian AI ecosystem, which is developing faster than Western media typically covers. Models from companies based in China, Japan, and Korea are increasingly competitive on specific tasks and often priced differently from their U.S. counterparts. A developer in Southeast Asia building a product for a local market may find that a regional model outperforms a U.S. one on the specific language and cultural context they need — and costs less to run at scale.

MonstarX was built with exactly this kind of flexibility in mind — an AI-native platform that lets developers in Asia connect to multiple AI providers and swap between them without rebuilding their entire stack. As the IPO wave reshapes pricing and availability across the U.S. AI landscape, that architectural flexibility stops being a nice-to-have and becomes a genuine competitive advantage.

The developers who thrive through this transition won't be the ones who picked the right foundation model in 2024. They'll be the ones who built systems flexible enough to adapt as the market restructures around public company incentives.

Key Takeaways

Here's what to hold onto from this moment:

• The AI IPO wave is real and accelerating. SpaceX's historic debut has opened the floodgates. OpenAI and Anthropic filing confidentially within weeks of each other isn't coincidence — it's a coordinated read of market conditions. Expect multiple major AI IPOs before the end of 2026.
• Public markets change incentives. Once OpenAI and Anthropic are public companies, they answer to shareholders, not just to their missions. Developer pricing, API availability, and product roadmaps will increasingly be shaped by what drives revenue growth and margin expansion — not what's best for builders.
• The ripple effect is already spreading. As Kirsten Korosec noted on the Equity podcast, startups are already raising money to ride the SpaceX wave — pitching orbital data centers and other concepts SpaceX helped legitimize. The same dynamic will play out in AI: expect a surge in startups positioning themselves as picks-and-shovels plays for the newly public AI giants.
• Asia is both exposed and positioned. Asian capital is deeply embedded in the U.S. AI ecosystem, which means Asian investors will benefit from these IPOs. But Asian developers building on U.S. AI infrastructure are also exposed to the pricing and policy changes that come with public market accountability.
• Portability is the new moat. For developers, the single most important architectural decision in the next 12 months is whether your AI stack is portable. Build for flexibility, not lock-in.
• Watch the secondary effects. The most interesting story isn't which AI company IPOs first. It's which companies, business models, and developer ecosystems get built on the liquidity and market sentiment that these IPOs generate. That's where the next generation of Asian AI startups will find their opening.

The SpaceX IPO made Elon Musk a trillionaire. What it's making everyone else — developers, founders, investors across Asia — is more alert to the fact that the AI infrastructure layer is about to be governed by public market logic. The builders who understand that shift earliest will be the ones who design around it most effectively.

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