Financing the AI Revolution Recap: AI and the IPO Market

After a yearslong slump in the initial public offering market, 2025 was poised to be the year exits made a comeback, with many big companies in tech and artificial intelligence—including Databricks, Chime, StubHub and Klarna—primed to hit the exchange and deliver a long-anticipated return on investment. All of that was before Trump’s on-again, off-again tariff whims ushered in a state of stasis, effectively putting IPOs on pause.

At a recent panel exploring the future of AI IPOs, Cory Weinberg, The Information’s deputy bureau chief for finance, sat down with two experts who are often the first port of call for companies considering an exit.

• Michael Harris, vice chair and global head of capital markets, NYSE Group
• Tony Kim, managing director of fundamental equities, BlackRock

Where Do We Go From Here?

Lenders are just starting to recover from a tumultuous couple of months that Tony Kim described as a period of “shellshock and triage.” But after weeks of silence, he said, companies are slowly resuming meetings and taking tentative steps toward going public.

While the IPO market is expected to remain subdued compared to the bullish predictions of early 2025, Michael Harris noted that some companies are still likely to file in the near term—just not necessarily ones in tech.

“The names you’re going to see in the near term are likely those that will be less impacted by tariffs—so those that are more defensive in nature,” said Harris. He added that smaller companies, with fewer backers, are more likely to make the leap.

Meanwhile, high-profile tech names considering an IPO are likely to watch those earlier listings closely—like canaries in a coal mine.

“The pricing outcome is going to dictate how future deals will be received,” said Harris. “In the near term, tech companies are going to go through the process of testing the waters and then figure out if there’s a window of opportunity.”

The performance of these near term deals will serve as a barometer for what’s to come. Should they perform well, the incentive will be clear for future issuers of all sectors—including tech—to feel comfortable moving forward with their offerings too.

Tech’s Next Players

According to Kim, investors waiting to reap a return via AI-related IPOs may need to be patient.

“I’m speculating, but my guess is that the number of IPOs this year will not be much more than last year or the year before—and most of those companies are not going to be this AI class,” he said, noting that AI companies “need more time to bake.”

Instead, he predicts that the previous generation of tech unicorns—fintech, software as a service, and digital asset companies—are more likely to do an IPO first, since many have public market equivalents that make them easier to value.

“You have a sense of what those companies are likely to be valued at, and that’s a decision [venture capitalists] and [limited partners] want to take,” he said.

An AI Capital Expenditures Bubble?

Tech companies have already spent upward of $200 billion on AI infrastructure—a figure that continues to rise. Whether that signals an impending bubble or simply a long-term investment cycle is still unclear.

Either way, AI companies know they need to justify the return on that spend. To do so, many are becoming full-stack providers—controlling everything from chip production to cloud services to the agentic or application layers.

“I would say broadly that if you control multiple of those layers, you have more room to extract margin out of AI,” said Kim.

First-Mover Advantage

There’s a potential upside for companies bold enough to go public now, even if the landscape remains volatile.

“The whims of the market are changing every week. If you’re on file, you can opportunistically hit a perceived market window with instant notice,” said Kim. “If you’re not on file, you have to go through all that rigmarole.”

CoreWeave—which had one of the few AI-related IPOs this year—demonstrates that exits are still possible, even in what Kim described as the worst environment since 2022.

“The CoreWeave IPO is a strong testimony to what’s possible and shows that there are still deals to be had,” said Kim. “The stock market votes with its trades, and CoreWeave is still above the IPO price, which speaks volumes.”