After FAANG, meet MANGOS: Six AI powerhouses drawing trillions in investment

FAANG was once the defining investment keyword for US markets. The acronym — grouping Facebook (now Meta), Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google — came to symbolize the mobile and platform era. After CNBC host Jim Cramer coined the term, it spread widely among global investors, and the companies it named became the benchmark growth stocks driving the US market rally of the 2010s.

As the AI era takes hold, a new coinage is gaining traction among investors: "MANGOS," an acronym drawn from the first letters of Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI and SpaceX.

The term has been spreading through Telegram channels and overseas investment communities. While it has yet to establish itself as a formal investment term, it is being used to describe the cluster of companies at the heart of the AI ecosystem, according to the financial investment industry Wednesday.

The companies in MANGOS share a common thread: each controls a critical segment of the AI industry. Meta is building an open-source AI model and content ecosystem; Anthropic is expanding its presence in the enterprise AI and AI agent market. Nvidia leads in GPUs, AI factories and physical AI, while Google is deepening its generative AI, tensor processing unit (TPU) and cloud businesses. OpenAI is at the forefront of the generative AI and AI agent race, and SpaceX — backed by its Starlink satellite network — is drawing attention as a next-generation AI infrastructure company.

The valuations of these companies have already swelled into the tens of trillions of dollars. Nvidia's market capitalization stands at $5.04 trillion, while Google's parent Alphabet is valued at $4.4 trillion and Meta at $1.48 trillion. Privately held Anthropic and OpenAI are valued at approximately $965 billion and $852 billion, respectively. SpaceX is pursuing an IPO targeting a valuation of $1.8 trillion.

Where the FAANG companies pursued high profitability through platform and software-driven growth, the MANGOS companies are competing for AI dominance through massive capital expenditure — data centers, semiconductors, power infrastructure and space infrastructure. The contest has shifted away from expanding user bases and monetizing advertising and subscriptions, toward a large-scale capital race to develop AI models, build data centers and secure semiconductors.

Some in the industry describe the AI sector as having become, in effect, a "money game" among mega-cap companies. With astronomical sums flowing into data centers, power infrastructure and AI semiconductors, only companies with enormous financial firepower can compete.

As the AI dominance race intensifies, MANGOS companies are moving aggressively to raise capital. According to Reuters, SpaceX secured more than $250 billion in investor demand during its IPO process — roughly 3.5 to four times its $75 billion fundraising target — with final demand potentially rising further as some large institutional investors have yet to complete their subscriptions. SpaceX is set to list on the Nasdaq on June 12.

OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, set a Silicon Valley fundraising record in March, raising $122 billion from Amazon, Nvidia, SoftBank and others at a valuation of $852 billion. The company has also announced plans to invest $600 billion in AI infrastructure by 2030.

Listed companies are also moving aggressively to shore up their finances. Alphabet recently announced a capital-raising plan worth $84.75 billion, and reports have emerged that Meta is considering a share offering — adding to the wave of capital mobilization aimed at expanding AI investment.

Analysts say this shift is fundamentally different from the FAANG era. Back then, big tech companies secured high profitability through platform- and software-centered business models and boosted earnings per share and return on equity through buybacks. In the AI era, large-scale physical investment in data centers, semiconductors and power infrastructure has become essential, making securing investment capital a higher priority than buybacks.

"In the past, FANG companies could maintain high profitability without massive capital expenditure, but in the AI era, capital investment to secure data centers, power and semiconductors is indispensable," said Kim Il-hyuk, a researcher at KB Securities.

He added that an IPO or share offering is not necessarily negative for a share price — ultimately, what matters is how much growth the raised capital can generate.

South Korean investors are also directing money toward MANGOS companies. According to the Korea Securities Depository, as of June 8, the value of overseas shares held in custody by Korean investors stood at $18.1 billion for Nvidia, $8.6 billion for Alphabet and $1.17 billion for Meta. Should privately held OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX go public, investor interest from South Korea is expected to grow further.