- Three mega AI financing deals announced Monday had one name in common: Goldman Sachs. The bank co-led Meta Platforms’ $95 billion share offering, was the sole structuring agent on SpaceX’s $40 billion chip financing and was named lead-left bookrunner on Anthropic’s IPO, which is expected to be at least as big as SpaceX’s June listing.
- Together the deals total at least $210 billion, and Bloomberg reports Goldman is likely to earn a windfall worth at least tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars. For scale, Goldman was paid $100 million in fees as lead bookrunner on SpaceX’s record-setting IPO in June.
- The Anthropic mandate surprised some, since Morgan Stanley has led work expanding the AI firm’s debt revolver facility. Goldman’s relationship is led by San Francisco bankers Nick Giovanni and Jung Min, who is also a top banker to Nvidia, and the bank was earlier the only one in a partnership that committed in August to finance $500 billion of AI chip deals for Nvidia customers.
- The AI rush is lifting Wall Street’s deal desks broadly: the five biggest firms booked almost $19 billion of underwriting revenue in the first nine months of the year, with equity capital markets up 48% and debt underwriting up 13%. The flip side is rising concern that some of the debt and equity pouring into AI, along with cash burn at frontier labs, could prove unsustainable.
What Happened?
On Monday, Meta announced a share offering of up to $95 billion that Goldman co-led, SpaceX signed a roughly $40 billion deal to buy Nvidia chips backed by a lease with Apollo Global Management, and Anthropic publicly filed for its IPO with Goldman as lead-left bookrunner. On the SpaceX deal, Goldman acted as structuring agent while funds managed by its asset management arm committed money; the deal came together after SpaceX called the bank months ago and is separate from the Nvidia partnership. Goldman was also an adviser to Alphabet on its more than $80 billion package of equity offerings, and its key bankers on that deal, Kim Posnett and Yasmine Coupal, drove the Meta transaction. A Goldman representative declined to comment.
Why It Matters?
Goldman has positioned itself to capture fees at every layer of the AI capital stack, from IPOs and follow-on stock sales to structured chip financing, and it is using its own asset manager’s capital alongside its advisory work. The capital solutions group it formed last year, led by Pete Lyon and Mahesh Saireddy, is designed to pull together its investment bank, asset manager and trading operations for large financing packages, which is exactly what deals like SpaceX’s require. “We feel like we sit right in the center of this investment super cycle,” Goldman President John Waldron said in May. That positioning is a direct earnings lever for the stock, but it also ties Goldman’s fee growth more closely to the health of the AI financing cycle.
What’s Next?
Investors will look for the fee impact in Goldman’s investment banking results in coming quarters, as the Anthropic IPO and Meta’s stock sales are executed. The key risk is a sentiment turn: shares of some neoclouds have slumped over the past month and concern has surfaced in the debt and equity of companies such as CoreWeave, which could slow the pipeline of AI deals. How Anthropic trades after its debut will be the next major test for the banks that have built their recent growth around AI financing.
Affected Tickers and Coins: GS, META, NVDA, APO
Source: Bloomberg
