The biggest AI IPOs in American history are coming.

We're talking about OpenAI and Anthropic, which have already filed their S-1 registration statements to go public, and tech analyst Luke Lango has found a “Pre-IPO Backdoor Play” that let's us buy into them at a huge discount.

The Teaser

The next big AI investing opportunity is here, but it's not the obvious one being promoted by the financial media.

Luke is known for giving hot takes on tech and AI across a few premium InvestorPlace investment newsletters, including the Innovation Investor, which is promoted in this teaser.

We have covered some of his previous takes, including his White House Target Stocks and most recently, “Bank of Elon” Stocks.

Two companies, $2 trillion in combined value.

In less exuberant times, this would imply a conversation about the two largest companies in the world, not two pre-IPO companies that didn't exist a decade ago or five years ago if you're Anthropic. But here we are.

The general consensus is that Anthropic will IPO at a valuation of $1 trillion or more, while OpenAI is targeting a public debut somewhere between $850 billion and $1 trillion.

Neither business is booking more than $50 billion in annual revenue, if we include some highly questionable circular deals, and both are losing around $20 billion per year, with recently leaked financial docs revealing that OpenAI lost $21 billion from operations in fiscal 2025. Oh and they have accumulated more than $100 billion in combined off-balance sheet debt.

Yet this is what's being sold to us as the biggest investment opportunities…ever.

Luke is calling bs, saying directly buying into these IPO's could be the biggest mistake, while dropping some hints about a “Pre-IPO Backdoor Play“, where the biggest gains will come from.

The Pitch

Luke has a pick that he believes is the best way to play two of the biggest IPOs in American history, and it is revealed in a report called The Pre-IPO Backdoor.

We can get it by signing up for the Innovation Investor newsletter, which costs $49 upfront for the first year (normally $199). A sub also comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee and promises regular AI, quantum, robotics, and space economy stock picks.

The Darkside of IPOs

“You can rob, you can steal, or you can make $10 million in an IPO.”

Whomever said this, wasn't far off the reality.

Of course, the ones making the $10 million are the company founders, early employees, and the investment bankers underwriting the offering, not individual retail investors like most of us.

To toot my own horn just a bit, I do have some insight into IPO performance. I penned a paper for Institutional Investor's Journal of Investing all the way back in the summer of 2014 on the performance of IPOs compared to other investment strategies. Hint: it wasn't good.

Professor Jay Ritter's excellent IPO data resource is more recent and expounds on this.

From 2011-2024, the median one-year return of new issues was -1.7% while the average 3-year buy and hold return was 19.1%, lagging the general market by 20.5%.

Safe to say, buying an index fund and forgetting about it would have been a better choice than chasing the latest ‘hot' IPO.

To his credit, Luke Lango arrives at the same conclusion, sort of, by saying:

Every major tech IPO of the last 20 years, whether it's Facebook, Uber, GoPro, Twitter, Snap, or Alibaba, the IPO buyers underperformed, while specific “backdoor” stocks soared 500%, 1,000%, even 5,000% or more.

The latter part of this claim is tough to verify, as there are no reliable statistics on major IPO supplier stock performance. But we can start tracking it here with the company Luke believes is positioned to blast off from the upcoming OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs.

Revealing Luke Lango's Pre-IPO Backdoor Play

It all starts with a pick that “gives us a stake in Anthropic and exposure to OpenAI through the three companies funding their future.”

This is the Krane Shares Public-Private AI & Technology ETF (Nasdaq: AGIX).

It owns a direct equity stake in Anthropic and Microsoft, which is the primary financial backer and cloud provider of OpenAI.

However, the biggest gains don't come from this pick.They come from a few more “Backdoor” plays, starting with…

The world's most ubiquitous chip architecture company

It's hardware sits inside virtually every cloud platform running ChatGPT, Claude, and the AI applications of tomorrow.

The AI chip architecture market is dominated by one name – Arm Holdings Plc (Nasdaq: ARM), which designs the chips for over 45% of data center and AI server market.

The company holding the largest AI contract in history

Luke is talking about a $300 billion agreement with OpenAI to build the next generation of AI infrastructure.

One of the largest commercial cloud procurement agreements in history, OpenAI has committed to purchasing an average of $60 billion per year in computing capacity from Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) for at least five years.

The custom AI silicon designer

It has struck a partnership with Anthropic, co-designing the chips that power the next generation of AI.

This sounds like Broadcom Inc.(Nasdaq: AVGO), which currently co-designs custom Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) for Anthropic's future Large Language Models (LLMs) models and dominates the market for design of AI Application-Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs).

The dominant supplier of high-bandwidth memory

It powers ChatGPT, Claude, and every major AI lab on the planet.

Micron Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: MU)* is one of the three big players in the AI memory market along with SK Hynix and Samsung, and it's High-Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips are used by Anthropic, Google, Amazon, and Meta, among others.

The Best Way to Play the Biggest AI IPOs Ever?

According to “probably the best single measure of where valuations stand at any given moment,” the market is more cooked than a charbroiled meat patty.

We already know that buying directly into new IPOs is likely to yield below-average results and loading up on an index at present valuations could be even worse.

However, there's always alpha in some pocket of the market, are Luke's pre-IPO backdoor plays that niche?

I don't believe so.

Apart from the Krane ETF pick, all of Luke's plays are mega-caps that are intimately intertwined with the AI boom, so any re-valuation of AI poster boys such as Nvidia and Microsoft is likely to cause associated businesses to plunge.

But if push came to shove and I was forced to buy into one today, it would be Oracle.

At a market cap of ‘only' $439 billion with a current price/earnings of 25x, and a 1.3% annual dividend, no other pick comes close to matching it's combination of value and potential upside.

Per it's fiscal 2025 results, Oracle posted high single-digit year-over-year revenue growth on the back of it's cloud business, so it has a solid chance to join the $1 trillion-dollar club over the long-term.

Quick Recap & Conclusion

• Tech analyst Luke Lango has found a “Pre-IPO Backdoor Play” that let's us buy into the biggest AI IPOs ever at a huge discount.
• Luke's pick is a better way to play two of the biggest IPOs in American history – OpenAI and Anthropic.
• It is revealed in a report called The Pre-IPO Backdoor, which we can get by signing up for the Innovation Investor newsletter. It costs $49 upfront for the first year (normally $199).
• Lukes gives away his “pre-IPO backdoor play” as Krane Shares Public-Private AI & Technology ETF (Nasdaq: AGIX) and we also revealed four more “backdoor plays” for free as Arm Holdings Plc (Nasdaq: ARM), Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL), Broadcom Inc. (Nasdaq: AVGO), and Micron Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: MU)*.
• Others may dominate in high-growth verticals, but Oracle is the best example of “price is what you pay, value is what you get“.

Do the upcoming OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs signal a top in the market? Leave your thoughts in the comments.

*The author owns shares in Micron Technology Inc. (Nasdaq: MU).