Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
If 2026 turns into a vintage year for IPOs, it will be because the US finally unleashes a backlog of deals so big, so familiar, and so culturally resonant that they overwhelm almost everything else.
The rumour mill is already churning out blockbuster names, each of which would rank among the world’s largest public companies. SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, and others are reportedly preparing offerings expected to raise tens of billions of dollars.
Their scale is staggering. According to MainFT, SpaceX is arranging a secondary stock sale that would value the company at $800bn, presaging an IPO likely to eclipse Saudi Aramco in 2019 as the largest public listing in history. OpenAI is reportedly targeting a valuation of $750bn or more in its current financing round discussions with investors, while Anthropic is negotiating its own raise at a valuation anticipated to surpass $300bn. Further down the pipeline, heavyweight contenders like Databricks and Canva are also said to be considering public listings. There is even speculation about reprivatising the big kahunas of US housing finance, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, via a stock market flotation.
If even a fraction of this dealflow materialises, it would dominate headlines and force a global reallocation of capital, potentially at the expense of nearly every other market. These listings absorb months of market inflows and occupy the full spectrum of mental bandwidth, leaving little room for mid-caps, regional plays, or anything that is merely “interesting” rather than essential.
For Europe, this looming wave of US issuance exposes a deeper misdiagnosis of what ails its domestic equity markets. The debate in London, Frankfurt, and Paris remains mostly technocratic, focusing on simplified prospectus disclosures, dual-class shares, and free-float requirements. Such reforms are worthy, but they address the plumbing, not what flows through the pipes. The core problem is that global investors are simply more captivated by the growth stories coming to market elsewhere.
For a time, European issuers convinced themselves they could exploit a form of geo-arbitrage by listing in New York to capture US-style valuation multiples. The results have underwhelmed. German footwear icon Birkenstock and Swedish fintech Klarna both chose US listings but have struggled to sustain their IPO prices. While America offers deeper liquidity, it also demands high visibility. For a foreign issuer, the risk of being overlooked in a crowded US market is acute, unless that company is perceived as a genuine “must-own” asset.
The inverse is equally, and uncomfortably, true. If a European company fails to excite global investors, listing at home offers little solace. When I worked on IPOs, the most dispiriting feedback was invariably that investors were focused elsewhere or that “there are bigger fish to fry”. Trying to persuade them to spend time on such an asset felt as futile as shouting into a wind tunnel. Most institutional managers will prioritise a once-in-a-generation AI company over, say, a well-run Austrian widget maker, regardless of the latter’s stellar margins.
This behaviour is driven by asymmetrical career risk. For a fund manager, missing a European mid-cap IPO that performs well is a marginal mishap. Missing a multibillion-dollar offering that rallies sharply — as seen with Medline’s recent $6.3bn Nasdaq IPO — can lead to immediate and irretrievable underperformance versus peers or benchmarks.
The contrast with the 1990s is instructive. That period marked the last time European IPOs felt like tent-pole events, driven by privatisations of national champions in telecoms, utilities, and financial services. These were strategic assets with scale, visibility, and often dominant market positions. Today, Europe still produces high-quality companies in specialised sectors such as life sciences and industrial automation, but they rarely arrive with the narrative resonance that commands global attention like many US tech listings.
Ultimately, capital is as promiscuous as it is agnostic. It will flow to Amsterdam or Copenhagen if an opportunity is compelling enough to move the needle for a global portfolio. Yet until Europe produces more companies of real scale and strategic relevance, any IPO revival will be uneven. Activity will surge in risk-on markets but then fade once American megadeals come to dominate the issuance calendar. The constraint is not volume per se, but the scarcity of listings that global investors regard as essential.
If 2026 indeed becomes the year of the American leviathans, Europe’s preoccupation with listing rules will look like an effort to repair irrigation pipes while the river of investor flows is being diverted elsewhere. The real question is not where European companies should list, but why so few are regarded as must-own by global investors in the first place.
