US IPOs raised $115.6 billion in the first half of 2026, but the market still has to prove it can work for companies that aren't SpaceX or SK Hynix.
SpaceX did more to define the first half of 2026 than any other company on the stock market. One deal carried the tape. Elon Musk's rocket company began trading on Nasdaq on June 12 under the ticker SPCX, and Business Insider reported that the listing raised $75 billion at a $1.77 trillion valuation. That was enough to make it the largest IPO on record, and enough to distort almost every clean reading of the market.
The headline number still looks huge. EY's second-quarter Global IPO Trends report put U.S. IPO proceeds at $115.6 billion for the first half of the year. But you can't read that figure honestly without separating the outliers from the window they supposedly reopened. SpaceX alone made up about two thirds of the proceeds.
SK Hynix supplied the next headline. The South Korean memory-chip maker priced its American depositary receipts at $149 each, then opened at $170 on Nasdaq. MarketWatch reported that the offering raised roughly $26.5 billion, making it one of the largest U.S. share sales ever completed by a foreign issuer. The company is not a random semiconductor name. It supplies high-bandwidth memory to Nvidia, and investors are still paying up for anything tied tightly enough to AI infrastructure.
Put SpaceX and SK Hynix together and you get more than $100 billion of the year's IPO proceeds. That's the issue. A market that depends on two companies for most of its volume is open, but only in a narrow way. It isn't broad yet.
The next listings have to carry their own weight
Rachel Gerring, EY's Americas IPO leader, has been watching whether investor demand can move beyond a handful of mega-deals. Her firm's read is still constructive: if filings turn into actual listings, the second half of 2026 could become one of the strongest IPO stretches since the 2021 boom.
That's a real possibility. It is not a guarantee.
The next names don't look much like SpaceX or SK Hynix. Kraken, Blockchain.com, ConsenSys and Dataiku have all been reported as IPO candidates. Anthropic is the wilder case. AP reported in May that the Claude maker raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation, and Business Insider later reported that secondary-market trades pushed implied values even higher. OpenAI has also been linked to a confidential filing, though reports still point more naturally toward 2027 than a rushed 2026 debut.
You should read that pipeline with some discipline. A company being watched by bankers is not the same thing as a company pricing shares. A confidential filing is not a listing. The IPO market has spent years teaching founders that lesson, especially after the 2021 class left too many public investors holding expensive software stocks with slowing growth.
Advanced manufacturing, defense, energy and automation software are the other areas EY expects to help widen the market, alongside AI infrastructure. Sierra Space has reportedly weighed a debut before year end. Anduril Industries, the defense technology company founded by Palmer Luckey, was last valued near $14 billion and is being watched as a test of whether defense tech has its own public-market audience separate from the AI trade.
That audience looks more serious than it did a few years ago. NATO members are under pressure to spend more on defense, and Germany's expanded infrastructure commitments have given investors another reason to look at companies selling into public budgets rather than consumer cycles. Frankly, that's a healthier test than another AI multiple pushed to the edge of belief.
Founders need breadth, not spectacle
Say you're a founder or a VC, and your company doesn't build rockets, memory chips or frontier AI models. This is the part of the story that matters to you. A market fixated on two or three enormous offerings has very little room for a mid-cap defense contractor, an industrial software company or a profitable automation business to test demand.
A broader market does.
That difference matters because IPO windows are often described too neatly. Bankers say the window is open. Founders hear that exits are back. But a window that only works for SpaceX, SK Hynix and maybe Anthropic isn't really open for the average late-stage company. It is a VIP entrance with a line outside.
The better signal will come from smaller listings over the next six months. If investors buy companies with $2 billion, $5 billion and $10 billion valuations, the market has changed. If they only chase the same few names already dominating private-market conversations, then 2026 will be remembered less as a reopening and more as a year when two gigantic deals made the totals look healthier than the market underneath.
The SpaceX number got everyone's attention. It should. But founders planning a 2027 exit should care more about what happens after the spectacle fades. The real IPO market is not measured by one rocket company. It is measured by whether everyone else can get through the door.
Also read: Circle Wins Final OCC Approval to Open a National Trust Bank • Elliott builds a stake in CCC Intelligent Solutions as a sale looms • SK Hynix's CEO Says the Memory Chip Crunch Will Outlast This Decade
