The Nasdaq is now ticking back toward the late October record highs.
This, after a 10% technical correction (peak-to-trough in the Nasdaq futures), accommodated by a story that conveniently fit the price.
After a flurry of deals between Nvidia, the hyperscalers and OpenAI, it became obvious that Nvidia was making meaningful investments into the ecosystem that would ultimately drive more demand (more revenue) for Nvidia GPUs.
Was it a shell game, moving money from one pocket to another? The signs of hubris we’ve seen in past bubbles?"
As I said in my November 3rd note (here): In this case, it looks more like a feature of the AI infrastructure boom, not a bug.
It's coordination across big tech, which accelerates the infrastructure build. And that only widens the competitive moats.
For OpenAI, which is inherently at risk of losing ground to model commoditization, these deals give them the competitive advantage to widen the lead in scaling global AI usage — plus the cloud companies now have an incentive to see OpenAI stay relevant.
With that in mind, the past two months have shown that the competitive edge in AI is shifting from “who has the best model” to "who has the capital to lock down computing capacity."
That’s why the IPO discussion is heating up. There were reports today that Anthropic and OpenAI are looking to go public in 2026.
When the “price of staying relevant” becomes tens of billions of dollars — to hire and retain talent, secure GPU supply, reserve data center capacity, and fund power build-outs — the private market eventually hands the baton to the public market.
If we look at the parallels between the current environment and the late 90s technology revolution, we should expect a boom in IPOs.
Here's a look at the volume of IPOs in the late 90s. Importantly, the biggest surge came early, in 1996. The frenzied return chasing came late, in 1999.
And let's revisit how the late 90s IPO boom influenced the Wall Street kings of underwriting.
Here's JP Morgan …
Citibank …
Morgan Stanley …
And no one was responsible for more IPO underwriting volume in that era than Goldman Sachs. And they went public in 1999, in the height of the frenzy. The stock went up 60% in 10 months, before the stock market topped in March of 2000.
