Goldman Sachs Secures Three AI Financings Worth $210 Billion: Meta, SpaceX and Anthropic IPO

On Monday, three AI mega-financing deals totaling at least $210 billion landed simultaneously, and Goldman Sachs' name appeared in every one of them. That day, Goldman Sachs co-led Meta Platforms' stock offering of up to $95 billion, served as the sole structuring agent for SpaceX's $40 billion chip financing deal, and acted as left-lead bookrunner for Anthropic's initial public offering (IPO)—the latter expected to be at least comparable in size to SpaceX's listing in June this year.

These three deals will bring Goldman Sachs at least tens of millions of dollars, and possibly even hundreds of millions of dollars, in revenue.

The AI financing boom is reshaping the competitive landscape on Wall Street. The underwriting revenue of the five largest Wall Street banks combined has exceeded $19 billion in the first nine months of this year, with equity capital markets revenue surging 48% year over year and debt underwriting revenue up 13%. With its deep positioning in the AI ecosystem, Goldman Sachs is turning this super-cycle into tangible business advantage.

$210 billion in a single day, three deals showcasing dominance

In the Meta deal, Goldman Sachs served as a joint lead manager, participating in one of the largest stock offerings on Wall Street in recent years. In the SpaceX deal, Goldman Sachs was not only the sole structuring agent, but a fund under its asset management division also directly contributed capital—the deal involved SpaceX purchasing chips from Nvidia, with lease support provided by Apollo Global Management. According to a person familiar with the matter, the deal began with SpaceX proactively calling Goldman Sachs several months ago.

The arrangement for the Anthropic IPO surprised some market participants. Previously, Morgan Stanley had been leading the expansion of Anthropic's revolving debt credit facility, and the market widely expected it to occupy a core position in the IPO. According to people familiar with the matter, Goldman Sachs' relationship with Anthropic is led by San Francisco-based bankers Nick Giovanni and Jung Min, the latter also being a core banker for Nvidia.

In June this year, Goldman Sachs served as left-lead bookrunner for SpaceX's IPO, earning a $100 million underwriting fee thanks to years of relationship-building by senior bankers including Dan Dees, Kim Posnett, David Ludwig and Susie Scher. According to a Bloomberg report earlier this month, Goldman Sachs also earned hundreds of millions of dollars in incentive fee revenue from early investments it arranged for wealthy clients.

As for Alphabet, Goldman Sachs served as adviser on the Google parent's stock offering of more than $80 billion, one of the largest stock offerings in history; core bankers Posnett and Yasmine Coupal also led Monday's Meta deal.

To systematically integrate the resource advantages across its business lines, Goldman Sachs established a dedicated Capital Solutions team last year, led by Pete Lyon and Mahesh Saireddy, to coordinate asset management, investment banking and even trading businesses and build large-scale integrated financing solutions for clients.

In August this year, Goldman Sachs also became the only bank to join Nvidia's customer chip deal financing partnership, committing $500 billion in financing support for related transactions.

As the scale of debt and equity flowing into the AI sector continues to climb, coupled with the heavy cash burn of frontier AI labs, some market participants have begun to worry about the risk that related financing is unsustainable. These concerns have already shown up in the stock and bond performance of some companies—shares of emerging cloud computing companies (neoclouds) such as CoreWeave, which specialize in providing computing power support for the development and operation of AI models, have fallen notably over the past month.

However, Goldman Sachs President John Waldron said in May this year at Bernstein's annual Strategic Decisions Conference: "We feel we are at the center of this investment super-cycle." That sentence may be the most apt footnote to Goldman Sachs' current situation. Risk disclosure and disclaimer

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