Banks including Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Citigroup and UBS are now expanding formal coverage of private assets - a shift Bloomberg reports is being driven directly by the ChatGPT maker's outsized market impact and investors’ fear of missing the next seismic move in AI.

Citigroup, for example, has hired veteran tech analyst Heath Terry to lead private-company coverage, while JPMorgan recently published a deep-dive initiation note on OpenAI itself.

The rationale is twofold: clients either want to invest in these firms directly or understand how they threaten the public companies already in their portfolios.

With OpenAI and SpaceX valued at levels comparable to the top tier of the S+P 500, banks say ignoring them is no longer an option.

The trend is also accelerating as more tech giants stay private for longer, reducing the supply of new IPOs and forcing research desks to look elsewhere for growth.

UBS has already profiled roughly 1,400 private companies and built a network of more than 2,400 founders to support investor access.

Morgan Stanley has converted public-equity analysts into private-company specialists and launched a new product dedicated to analysing firms like Neuralink and Shein.

Covering private markets is harder - there are no quarterly filings, few standardized metrics, and research often requires fieldwork, expert interviews and proprietary data.

But analysts view that complexity as protection against AI-driven automation, since deeply qualitative, human-sourced insight is tough for models to replicate.

With nearly 1,600 global unicorns worth a combined $6.5 trillion, Wall Street now sees private-asset research as not just supplemental - but essential.