AI Unease Derails Big Year for Tech IPOs

But two months into 2026, bankers’ and investors’ hopes have been dampened by artificial intelligence (AI)-related fears, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported Tuesday (Feb. 24).

As the report notes, high-profile companies like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI have all been preparing to list this year. That’s opened the door to a host of smaller software firms also waiting to go public.

Then came fears that AI could make huge swaths of the software industry obsolete, leading to a massive stock selloff. The unease was exacerbated earlier this week by a report from Citrini Research about potential threats posed by AI. 

A White House economist later rejected the report, saying it “violates some of the basic accounting in economics.”

Now, investors and dealmakers expect that a handful of large IPOs will dominate the year, leaving most private tech companies waiting, and some already withdrawing their plans to list.

Of the tech stocks that listed last year, 75% are trading below their IPO prices, the WSJ added, citing data from Dealogic.

The report notes that Wall Street isn’t too concerned about a tech IPO drought. OpenAI and Anthropic are weighing IPOs near the end of the year, while SpaceX could go public in the late spring or summer. The latter listing, the WSJ added, could be the largest of all time, valuing SpaceX at more than $1 trillion.

“The giants are going to have incredible demand. Everybody and their parents will want to hold them,” Matt Witheiler, who specializes in private late-stage growth investing at Wellington Management, told the WSJ. “What’s going to happen with software is some companies will be worth zero.”

According to the WSJ, bankers also expect some cryptocurrency companies to do better than pure tech firms. Some of last year’s standout IPOs were digital asset companies like Circle, which had closed up about 98% from its IPO price on Tuesday. This year could see an IPO from crypto exchange Kraken, recently valued at $20 billion.

PYMNTS examined the market for crypto IPOs last month, arguing that a resurge in venture capital  investment in the digital asset space was a bet on the industry’s normalization, rather than its novelty.

“As digital assets inch closer to mainstream finance, the winners are likely to be firms that reduce friction, manage risk and translate crypto’s complexity into services that institutions can actually use,” that report said.