For the past two years, Nvidia Corp (NASDAQ:NVDA) has emerged as Wall Street’s preferred way to bet on artificial intelligence. It benefited from an arms race among AI developers scrambling to secure computing power.
The next challenge to its dominance in investor portfolios may not come from a rival chip company. It may come from some of Nvidia’s biggest customers.
SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are among the most closely watched private companies in the world. While SpaceX has filed its S-1 with the SEC and aims for a $2 trillion IPO and fast-track entry into NASDAQ indices, OpenAI and Anthropic haven’t disclosed imminent timelines.
Investors and analysts have long speculated that public listings could eventually rank among the largest technology offerings in history. Collectively, the three companies command valuations that already stretch into the hundreds of billions of dollars.
The AI Trade Evolves
The first phase of the AI boom rewarded the companies supplying the infrastructure.
Nvidia, alongside memory makers such as Micron Technology, Inc. (NASDAQ:MU) and SK Hynix, became some of the market’s biggest winners as demand for AI chips and servers exploded.
The next phase could look very different.
Rather than buying the companies selling the picks and shovels, investors may soon get the chance to buy stakes in the businesses using those tools to build AI models, products, and platforms.
In other words, Wall Street may be offered a direct stake in the AI application layer rather than the infrastructure layer.
A Battle For Capital, Not Customers
That’s what makes the potential IPO wave so intriguing.
SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic are not competing with Nvidia for customers. If anything, their growth has helped fuel demand for Nvidia’s hardware.
But they could eventually compete for something else: investor capital.
Fund managers don’t have unlimited room in their portfolios. If some of the world’s most valuable private technology companies come public, investors may have to decide whether the next dollar goes into today’s AI winners or tomorrow’s.
For Nvidia, that may represent a new kind of competition—one measured not in chip shipments or market share, but in portfolio allocation.
Image via Shutterstock
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