Founder & CEO, Altimeter
Technology investing and a wider stake in ownership.
Why this speaker matters
Separate enthusiasm about a company from the price paid to own it.
Their stated view
In July 2026, Gerstner said Altimeter would be interested in both OpenAI and Anthropic IPOs, while explicitly saying he did not know their order. That is dated investment interest, not a completed purchase or reliable listing schedule.
Relevant context
An infrastructure provider can serve several AI developers instead of betting on one winner. Even if businesses switch to cheaper open models, they still need computing power to run them. That is the case for investing in data centers rather than a particular model company. It works only if customers rent enough capacity at prices that cover the provider's costs.
Who they are
Brad Gerstner founded Altimeter, which invests in technology businesses in both public and private markets. Separately, he founded the Invest America Charitable Foundation in 2023. That initiative promotes investment accounts for children and financial education. His work therefore spans selecting companies for investment and advocating broader access to asset ownership.
What they are working on
Altimeter works with technology companies through different stages of growth, including their transition to public markets. Invest America focuses on children and families becoming investors. These are separate organizations, but together they explain why Gerstner’s public work extends beyond the next AI IPO to the question of who gets to participate in economic growth.
I think the answer to that is yes. I'm not sure there's a huge race between the two of them to get out first. I think they'll both go out when it's time. I think OpenAI has a little bit more complexity just associated with the corporate restructuring that they have to go through, et cetera. So I would be surprised if they go out before Anthropic, but the fact of the matter is I don't know. But today, as I sit here today, Altimeter would be a buyer at scale and at size in both of those IPOs.More Trillion Dollar IPOs, Anthropic $3T, Zuck's Price War, China Ends Open Source?, Trump Accounts ↗
Seek to 9:02
So the way I would frame it is Capex is high alpha, low beta in data center infrastructure, that capital. And model development theoretically could be high alpha, but it's very high beta. It's a very risky way to deploy capital. So if I'm the board, I'm the management, I'm deploying more capital in computing infrastructure, less capital into model development. That's what I think is going on.Google's AI Brain Drain, SpaceX's Huge Quarter, Airtable's 90% Collapse, US Data Fuels China AI ↗
Seek to 3:42
And half the queries are going to go to the open source model, maybe 85%, and only the hardest ones are then, maybe they all go to open source first, and only the hardest ones are then checked by the frontier models. So I think this is the future. It's coming. And a misconception that a lot of people have is that open source models are somehow bad for AI. They're awesome for the AI infrastructure providers. They just shift economic value from the margins of the frontier labs to the infrastructure. And that's not bad for AI.Socialists Sweep NYC, China Catches Up in Coding, AI Memory Crunch, Micron's Blowout Quarter ↗
Seek to 48:21
Listed by the Summit organizer ↗, checked 2026-09-09. Appearances may change. Atlas is an independent guide.
