Rubenstein says AI stock rally has room to run as IPO wave tops $75B

The AI stock rally that minted the world's first trillionaire and produced the largest IPO in history still has room to run, according to one of Wall Street's most influential private equity figures.

"I don't see the AI bubble bursting anytime soon," David Rubenstein, co-founder and co-chairman of the Carlyle Group, said on Bloomberg Surveillance on June 30. "The spending is real, the revenue is starting to show up, and the market is still trying to figure out who the winners will be."

AI-related stocks have delivered extraordinary returns this year. SpaceX, which merged with xAI earlier in 2026, raised $75 billion in its June 11 IPO — the largest in history — and now trades above $200, up 19% from its $135 offer price. CoreWeave, the AI cloud infrastructure provider that listed in March 2025 at $40, has surged nearly 200% to above $117 and was selected for inclusion in the Nasdaq-100 Index effective June 22. Anthropic, maker of the Claude AI model, confidentially filed for an IPO on June 1 targeting an October listing, following a $65 billion funding round that valued the company at $965 billion.

The AI investment wave has created a two-track market. The S&P 500 has gained 9.5% in the first half of 2026, hitting 24 all-time highs, while the MSCI China Index has tumbled 15% — the worst performance globally after Indonesia — as Chinese tech giants Tencent and Alibaba lost a combined $337 billion in market value. The divergence shows that AI exposure, not technology exposure broadly, is driving returns.

Rosenblatt Securities, in a report published Tuesday, identified eight stocks with "attractive risk-reward profiles" for the second half of 2026, including Ambarella, Quantinuum and Twilio. Analyst Kevin Cassidy called Ambarella a "Physical AI pure play" with a $120 price target, implying 79% upside from Monday's close. Quantinuum was named the firm's top pick, with analyst John McPeake setting a $155 target — 113% upside — citing the company's "most powerful production quantum computer on earth."

The $1.5 Trillion Question

The scale of capital committed to AI infrastructure is without precedent. CoreWeave reported 2025 revenue of $5.13 billion, up 168% year-over-year, and counts Microsoft, Meta and Anthropic among its customers. Anthropic plans to spend $19 billion on compute in 2026 alone and does not expect profitability until 2028, according to its IPO filing. The company's annualized revenue hit $30 billion in April 2026, growing 10x annually for three consecutive years, with 8 of the Fortune 10 as customers.

For investors, the challenge is separating durable winners from hype. CoreWeave trades with 36 analysts covering it at a consensus Buy and an average 12-month price target of $140, but carries significant debt from infrastructure buildout and customer concentration among a small number of hyperscalers. SpaceX, valued at roughly 94 times 2025 sales at its IPO price, posted a net loss of $4.9 billion last year, and Elon Musk retains 82.4% of voting power post-listing.

Rubenstein's view that the rally has further to go is shared by a growing number of institutional investors. The AI IPO pipeline — anchored by Anthropic's expected October debut and potential offerings from OpenAI and other labs — could add more than $1 trillion in market capitalization by year-end, based on current private valuations. The question is whether public markets can absorb that supply without a correction.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.