{"text":[[{"start":5.45,"text":"In any normal tech boom, the flood of new equity that AI companies are about to unleash on the stock market might look like a sign of a market top. When companies, almost in unison, become avid sellers of their own shares, watch out below. That was the clear lesson from the torrent of IPOs at the peak of the dotcom bubble."}],[{"start":24.099999999999998,"text":"The AI boom, however, is shaping up differently. At the turn of the century, the number of people online was far too small to justify the huge investments in telecoms networks and internet services. Now, by contrast, even the richest companies are struggling to finance the new data centres needed to meet surging demand for extra AI capacity."}],[{"start":44.5,"text":"The huge sums that Wall Street is about to be asked for look like being only a down payment on the much larger amounts that the AI industry will need to raise over the next few years. The $765bn likely to be spent on AI data centres this year will be only a tenth of the total needed by 2031, according to Goldman Sachs. "}],[{"start":66.3,"text":"The main question, through all of this, will be whether Wall Street investors can keep their pricing discipline. Nearly five years into the generative AI era, the early winners are starting to emerge. With the stock market’s AI party in full swing, will investors care?"}],[{"start":83.6,"text":"The public market floodgates officially open on Friday, when shares in Elon Musk’s SpaceX start trading. OpenAI also this week followed rival Anthropic in announcing a filing for an IPO of its own, setting up what is likely to be a historic moment for the capital markets. SpaceX on its own could bring in more than the entire annual amount raised in US IPOs in all but four years this century."}],[{"start":109.6,"text":"Other IPOs and secondary stock sales also look set to boom. In what may have been the biggest surprise for Wall Street, Alphabet set out this month to raise $85bn — the first equity it has sold since it went public nearly 22 years ago — even though it still has around $50bn of net cash on its balance sheet."}],[{"start":131,"text":"The path for all of this has been smoothed by mounting evidence during the past few months that the use of AI is exploding. Google, for instance, recently reported a nearly seven-fold increase over the past year in its production of AI tokens."}],[{"start":146.4,"text":"For some companies, the revenue lift is also becoming meaningful. Exhibit A for the AI bulls has been the take-off in revenue this year at Anthropic. Its success marks a breakthrough in the use of AI for coding, but this has engendered a firm belief that the same type of AI agents that write software today will soon infiltrate other forms of white-collar work."}],[{"start":166.55,"text":"Whether this tide will lift all companies equally, or whether they can service the demand profitably, are entirely different considerations. AI model builders like xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic face a particularly thorny set of questions. Foremost among them is whether they can achieve any product differentiation or pricing power amid fierce competition, particularly with cheaper open-source models from China registering big performance improvements."}],[{"start":194.8,"text":"It is also unclear how much customers will be willing to pay. The surge in token use by business customers, for instance, has been notable. But it isn’t clear yet how much that will translate into improved business performance rather than simply inflated tech bills."}],[{"start":211.70000000000002,"text":"The disclosures around the coming IPOs should provide far more insight and highlight the AI companies’ diverging prospects."}],[{"start":219.60000000000002,"text":"SpaceX, for instance, said it has agreed in recent weeks to sell excess data centre capacity to Anthropic and Google, two deals that stand to more than double its revenue. But it is unclear whether it can build an attractive business from renting out infrastructure rather than selling its own AI services, the reason it built the data centres in the first place."}],[{"start":240.85000000000002,"text":"OpenAI, meanwhile, has seen its revenue eclipsed by Anthropic, particularly in the profitable enterprise market. PitchBook estimates its gross profit margin to be around 33 per cent. That leaves little room to cover other operating costs and return a profit, and has set off a fervent search for new sources of growth ahead of an IPO."}],[{"start":262.35,"text":"By contrast, Anthropic has told investors it is on track to register its first operating profit this quarter. Alphabet’s profit margins have also climbed steadily as its AI investments have started to pay off."}],[{"start":274.85,"text":"Amidst the stock market euphoria surrounding SpaceX’s giant IPO, distinctions like these may be lost. But comparisons will become unavoidable in the coming months as Wall Street is asked to underwrite AI’s historic capital-raising boom."}],[{"start":297.45000000000005,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1781397166_4958.mp3"}