A $1.77 trillion valuation is the kind of number that stops a room. That is the target Elon Musk's SpaceX, which now houses his xAI unit and the Grok model, is reportedly chasing as it prepares to begin trading. It is also the backdrop against which Min-Liang Tan, the co-founder and chief executive of Singapore's Razer, stood onstage Thursday at the SuperAI convention and told the audience, in effect, that the parade has barely begun.
Speaking with CNBC's Joanna Ossinger, Tan argued that the current rush of artificial intelligence companies onto public markets is not a one-off but the leading edge of something more durable. He expects further rounds: a second generation, a third, fresh waves of listings rolling in behind the first. "This would be just the beginning," he said of the filings already piling up, according to CNBC. It is an optimistic read, and one worth weighing against a small inconvenient fact: the man making it runs a company that walked away from public markets four years ago.
The filings stacking up
The timing of Tan's comments is hard to ignore. SpaceX was set to make its debut the day after he spoke, and it is not arriving alone. OpenAI filed to go public on Monday afternoon in the United States, moving fast behind its chief rival, Anthropic, which had lodged its own paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission a week earlier.
The valuations involved are vast, and they keep moving. Anthropic closed its Series H round on May 28 at roughly $965 billion, a figure that put it ahead of OpenAI, which had been pegged at $852 billion back in March. Whether those private marks hold up once the companies face the discipline of public shareholders is, of course, the open question. Private rounds reward conviction. Public markets reward delivery, and they tend to ask harder questions about how the money actually gets made.
Still, the scale here is genuinely without precedent. A trillion-dollar-plus debut for SpaceX. Two of the most closely watched AI labs filing within days of each other. All of it landing in the same stretch of June 2026. If Tan is right that this is merely the opening act, the appetite of public investors is about to be tested in ways the sector has not seen before.
Razer's contrary path
Here is the irony at the center of the story. While AI's marquee names race toward Wall Street, the executive heralding the boom took his own firm in the opposite direction. Razer, the gaming hardware company known for its mice, keyboards and laptops, ended its run as a listed company on the Hong Kong exchange in April 2022, having spent half a decade trading there before going private. Tan has framed the move as a way to concentrate on AI development without the quarterly pressures of public ownership.
The numbers behind that retreat tell their own story. A consortium led by Tan and the Hong Kong private equity firm CVC Capital Partners offered as much as 10.79 billion Hong Kong dollars, about $1.38 billion, to buy out the shares it did not already control, pricing the offer at HK$2.82 each. That was below the HK$3.88 price at which Razer had listed in 2017. Going private, in other words, came after the public market had already cooled on the stock. The company did not exit on a high.
So there is a tension in Tan cheering an IPO wave from the sidelines. He is bullish on others tapping public capital while having decided his own company is better served outside it. That is not necessarily a contradiction. Private ownership gives a hardware maker room to spend heavily on long-shot bets without explaining every dollar to analysts. But it does color the endorsement.
The money behind the move
Razer's interest in AI is not rhetorical. The company said in February it had committed more than $600 million to AI development, and it has been pushing a line of wearable and desktop AI products aimed squarely at its gaming customers. Onstage at SuperAI, Tan promoted Project Motoko, an AI headset Razer unveiled in January at CES. The pitch: real-time translation, step-by-step cooking help, repair instructions delivered to the wearer.
The rest of the lineup includes a workstation built for heavy AI computing and Ava, described as an AI desktop companion. Tan said the company is "all-in on AI," and that it is experimenting with giving its software human-like personalities and emotional responses. That last ambition is the sort of thing that sounds compelling on a conference stage and proves devilishly hard to ship as a product people actually want. Plenty of companies have promised AI with a personality. Few have made it feel like anything other than a gimmick.
What Razer is really betting on is that AI moves off the cloud and onto the devices people carry and wear, which would play to its strengths as a hardware maker rather than a model builder. That is a different game from the one OpenAI and Anthropic are playing, and a different game again from SpaceX's. It also helps explain why Tan can speak so warmly about an IPO boom he has no intention of joining: the companies going public are, in a sense, building the engines that his hardware would put in front of users.
What to watch
The test now is whether public investors share Tan's read that this is a beginning rather than a peak. The AI listings arriving this month are exceptional by any historical measure, both in their valuations and in their concentration. Markets have a long record of treating the first wave of a hot sector generously and the later ones with rising suspicion. If SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic trade well after their debuts, capital tends to follow, and Tan's prediction of successive generations of AI IPOs becomes self-fulfilling. If any of them stumble out of the gate, the second and third waves he describes could thin out quickly.
There is also the matter of what these companies are worth once the private mystique gives way to public disclosure. A $965 billion mark set in a funding round is a negotiation between a company and a handful of late-stage investors. A valuation on a stock exchange is set, relentlessly, by everyone with an opinion and a brokerage account. The gap between those two things has humbled more than a few celebrated startups.
For now, the SpaceX IPO and the filings trailing it represent the largest collective bet the market has placed on artificial intelligence to date. Tan thinks it is the first of many. The next few quarters of trading will say whether the public was ready to keep paying private-market prices, or whether the wave he is describing crests sooner than he expects.