Over the past decade, it’s never felt like there’s been a perfect time to go public — the conditions are almost always rocky and the private markets have been so comparatively cozy.

But when you need as much capital as the frontier labs do, at some point you have to plug your nose and jump.

The last week has been a whirlwind of leaks, scoops, and announcements from Anthropic and OpenAI as they try to figure out how to land their next tranche of desperately needed capital.

On Monday pulled off a downright impressive scoop, getting its hands on what appears to be a draft of Anthropic’s prospectus. The numbers in it showed its staggering rate of spending. Last year Anthropic reported an operating loss of around $8 billion on revenue of $4.6 billion. It also was committed to spending $518 billion on cloud, computing, and infrastructure in the coming years.

The caveat here is these numbers are all before Anthropic’s Opus 4.6 model came out in February 2026; that was the monster model that kicked off the company’s agentic coding dominance and the subsequent “tokenmaxxing” craze that rocket-powered its revenue. Judging Anthropic without Opus 4.6 would be like evaluating Marvel before .

Still, there have been swirling questions about Anthropic’s revenue growth rate and whether the company would be able to hit a $2 trillion valuation in an IPO. It has already postponed an expected October debut and now is looking to start trading in November before Thanksgiving.

The public markets in general don’t seem too welcoming. SB Energy, the SoftBank subsidiary that builds AI data centers, delayed its IPO in September. And this week Oura postponed its IPO indefinitely, citing market conditions.

OpenAI, meanwhile, is trying to bide its time as long as possible. The company is in early talks to raise a new private round, targeting at least $30 billion at a $1.4 trillion valuation, which is supposed to last the company until a 2027 IPO. Sam Altman has been spinning the delay as a reaction to concerns over model safety rather than anything wrong with the underlying business — to that end, several outlets reported this week that the company’s annualized revenue had neared $70 billion.

The next few weeks will be very instructive in assessing the health of the AI business (and the economy writ large). If the latest Anthropic financials, when they get released in full, show a company with still-booming revenue growth, then there’s much more runway to this cycle and we’re likely to see a downstream effect on the rest of the industry. If we start to see a slowdown, then things will be rough for the foreseeable future.

Chipmaker AMD announced this week that it would be acquiring computer vision pioneer Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s AI startup World Labs for $8.2 billion in an all-stock deal. It is yet another shrewd move by AMD’s longtime CEO Dr. Lisa Su as the firm seeks to both win hyperscaler market share and expand into new verticals.

World Labs, fittingly, creates world models — simulated multi-modal and interactive environments that generate themselves in a consistent manner. The other big players in this space include Odyssey and former Meta chief scientist Yann LeCun’s AMI Labs. AMD says it is buying the firm to help it better understand how AI workloads are evolving as “demands on compute infrastructure become more diverse.”

In a Substack post discussing the acquisition, Li noted that Su was a “great friend” and an early investor in the firm. She also noted that the two companies had teamed up back in 2025 to conduct “model training and inference optimization on AMD GPUs.”In such a male-dominated industry, it is both striking and exciting that AMD now has two women in its most senior technical roles as the firm continues to rebuild its claim to being a serious NVIDIA competitor.

The World Labs acquisition is the news of the week, but the background story which bubbles along is that initial shipments of AMD’s first rack-scale AI solution, Helios, will begin by the year’s end. Investors are excited to see these systems out in the world; HPE stock rose sharply this week after it announced a $1.2 billion deal to provide Helios racks to cloud infrastructure company Vultr.

AMD’s enterprise-grade GPU product line, called Instinct, also boasts exceedingly healthy demand, with 14 gigawatts of demand for these chips from OpenAI, Meta and Anthropic alone. For reference, McKinsey projects that there is 62 gigawatts of total global AI workload capacity in 2026. Anthropic’s two gigawatt partnership will also take the form of Helios racks.

This is not to overstate AMD’s position; it lags well behind NVIDIA at a mere $1 trillion market cap, has a much higher P/E multiple and lacks the CUDA ecosystem moat. Nonetheless, AMD has handily beat analyst expectations four quarters in a row, and Dr. Su can take a deserved victory lap. If you have a big enough war chest, it’s easier to pay up for the best deals.

Megafunds that secured the most capital from 2010 to 2020 also tended to back the most future unicorns, according to data compiled by Dan Gray over at Odin.

Accel is the one outlier at the top — it raised less than $10 billion but invested in close to the same number of unicorns as a16z and Sequoia, which both brought in well over $10 billion during the same time frame.