Goldman Sachs $GS CEO David Solomon said Tuesday that investors have shifted into "greed" mode as markets prepare to absorb a string of massive public offerings from leading artificial intelligence companies.
"We are definitely in a moment where there's more greed than there is fear," Solomon told CNBC during an event hosted by the Economic Club of New York. Asked whether markets could support simultaneous large-scale offerings from OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX, Solomon said liquidity was not the constraint. "There's plenty of liquidity in the system if the world continues to remain as optimistic," he said.
Solomon pointed to Alphabet $GOOGL's $80 billion equity raise — the largest follow-on equity offering ever, according to Yahoo Finance — as evidence that markets remain receptive to AI at scale. Goldman Sachs served as private placement agent on that deal. "The stock's trading very well," Solomon said. "This is the first actual concrete data point for bringing something of this scale, and it's encouraging."
The scale of the current fundraising push is unlike anything markets have seen before, Solomon conceded, though he maintained that historically elevated levels of wealth and available capital are sufficient to absorb it. Money flowing out of AI winners — through taxes, reinvestment, and new ventures by employees and early backers — could keep feeding the broader cycle, he added. Still, he cautioned that the current mood could shift. Greed can "turn into fear very quickly, but that doesn't mean it will," Solomon said. "There's a good chance that we're earlier in the cycle than later."
Solomon's bank stands to benefit directly from the listings he was discussing. For SpaceX, Goldman has secured the top underwriting slot, while the firm is in contention for equivalent roles on the forthcoming offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic, Yahoo Finance reported.
The three companies are preparing to enter public markets with a combined market capitalization of roughly $3 trillion, a scale that would surpass any prior IPO wave in history. Anthropic submitted a confidential IPO prospectus to the Securities and Exchange Commission on Monday, with a valuation of $965 billion following a $65 billion fundraising round completed last week. OpenAI is working toward its own filing in the coming weeks, while SpaceX has already filed its prospectus and is conducting an investor roadshow this week ahead of a planned market debut.
Not every signal Solomon sent was bullish. He flagged corporate uptake as a potential drag on the AI build-out, noting that the companies actually paying for all that computing infrastructure tend to move cautiously. "Enterprises broadly will go slower at [using AI], they will be slower to change, they will be slower to adapt than I think some of the current expectation," Solomon said.