Nate
·All those companies who’ve put off their IPOs in the past couple of weeks weren’t crazy. A little-known data center builder, Accelevation (that’s not a typo) Holdings, braved the market and came off the worse for it.
After pricing its IPO at $18 on Tuesday—below its $20 to $24 tentative range—Accelevation saw its stock fall for two straight days to Thursday’s close of $16.59.
It has to be said that Accelevation is no prize. The company loses money and is carrying $647.8 million in debt against $28 million in cash on its balance sheet. It planned to use the money raised from the offering to reduce that debt, but only by about a quarter. And as its business is building data centers, including cabling and cooling, its growth depends on the AI boom. That’s a very hot business right now, with everyone seemingly jumping into the market, but it won’t last.
Still, even for healthy companies, this market may not be forgiving, thanks to steadily rising interest rates, among other things. That won’t necessarily stop more appealing companies from going public, however. Bloomberg reported on Thursday that Anthropic, the most hotly anticipated IPO of them all, is targeting its offering for mid-November.
The market by then may be in a different place altogether. In an appearance on #The Information ’s TITV on Thursday, Circle CEO Jeremy Allaire recalled that Circle made public its IPO paperwork in early April 2025, the day before President Donald Trump announced worldwide tariffs, sparking a big market selloff.
By the time Circle actually went public later that spring, Trump had backed down a little on the tariffs and the market had recovered. “No one can predict what’s going to happen tomorrow,” Allaire said.
https://www.theinformatio..
