Barron's published a piece this week framing Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley as the real beneficiaries of the AI IPO wave, earning underwriting, trading and advisory fees from the largest cluster of technology listings in a generation.
The observation is correct. It is also more interesting than the "picks and shovels" framing suggests, because the banks are not selling tools to the miners. They are selling tickets to the mine, taking a cut from every participant, and bearing none of the risk that the gold is actually there.
Fee bonanza
SpaceX is expected to list around June 12 in the largest IPO in stock market history. Anthropic filed a confidential S-1 on June 1 and could debut in the autumn. OpenAI filed its own SEC paperwork and is targeting a September listing at a valuation near $1 trillion.
Combined, these three offerings could raise more than $100bn in primary capital. Underwriting fees on technology IPOs typically run between 2% and 4% of proceeds, with additional revenue from stabilisation trading, secondary offerings and ongoing advisory work.
Goldman and Morgan Stanley are positioned across multiple mandates. Goldman is lead underwriter on SpaceX, advised on Alphabet's $85bn stock sale and placed Berkshire Hathaway's $10bn private investment. Morgan Stanley advised Broadcom on Anthropic's $35bn chip financing deal. Both banks are expected to feature on the OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs.
The aggregate fee pool from this wave of listings, secondary offerings and structured financings could represent one of the most concentrated periods of capital markets revenue in either bank's history.
Betting on winners
The AI investment debate is dominated by questions about which company will win. Will Anthropic outperform OpenAI? Will SpaceX justify a $1.8 trillion valuation? Will the AI capex cycle sustain long enough to reward the infrastructure builders?
The banks do not need to answer any of those questions. Their revenue is generated by the transactions, not the outcomes. An IPO that prices well generates fees. An IPO that prices poorly but still completes also generates fees. A company that goes public and then raises additional capital through secondary offerings generates more fees.
The only scenario in which the banks lose is if the IPOs do not happen at all, and with SpaceX days from listing and two more filings already with the SEC, that risk is minimal.
Broader capital markets picture
The AI IPO wave sits alongside Alphabet's $85bn equity raise, Anthropic's $35bn chip financing, Supermicro's $7bn equity-linked offering and the ongoing hyperscaler capex cycle that Morgan Stanley estimates will reach $800bn this year.
Every transaction in that list generates fees for the arranging banks. The cumulative effect is a capital markets environment where Goldman and Morgan Stanley are embedded in nearly every significant AI-related financial event of 2026.
Barron's framed the banks as picks and shovels. The more accurate analogy is the house in a casino: it does not matter which player wins or loses. The house takes a percentage of every hand dealt, and the AI boom is dealing more hands than any cycle since the internet.
Goldman Sachs closed Tuesday at an all-time high. Morgan Stanley is near its own. The market has noticed, even if the AI narrative has not made room for the banks that make it all possible.
