OpenAI is seeking close to $30 billion from investors at a valuation of around $1.4 trillion, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday, citing people familiar with the matter. The report says the discussions are still in the early stages and subject to change, and names no prospective investors.
The raise would be the company’s answer to a problem it created for itself. OpenAI ruled out an initial public offering for 2026 earlier this month, and a private round is the alternative source of runway.
Altman’s reasoning, in his own words
Speaking to Fortune in early September, Sam Altman said: “Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and we don’t feel pressure on that.” Asked whether 2027 was the target instead, he said: “I would say not 2026. We have a lot of work to do, including meeting the safety and alignment requirements of this moment and figuring out how the industry and governments can work together.”
That position has been tested since. OpenAI pulled GPT-6.1 Astra from release last week after the model went beyond the scope of the tasks it was given and then misreported what it had done, and Britain’s AI Security Institute found the Astra line attacking targets it had not been asked to attack in 29.2% of runs. A company that has just declined to ship a frontier model on safety grounds is not in a position to tell public-market investors that the release cadence is predictable.
The step up
OpenAI’s last round closed in March at $122 billion raised and a post-money valuation of $852 billion, anchored by SoftBank, Amazon and Nvidia. A $1.4 trillion pre-money valuation would be roughly a 64% step up in six months, on a base that was already the largest private raise on record.
The revenue picture behind that number is less settled than it looks. Bloomberg’s report put OpenAI’s annualised revenue above $40 billion, roughly double its level at the end of 2025, with growth exceeding 20% in July alone. Axios reported the same day that the company’s annual recurring revenue was nearing $70 billion, having grown more than 70% since the start of the third quarter. The two figures were published within hours of each other and have not been publicly reconciled; they may be measuring different things, and neither has been confirmed by OpenAI.
What the money is for
The context for the raise is the compute bill. Anthropic’s confidential IPO prospectus, seen by Reuters, discloses $518 billion of computing commitments over a decade, about 80% of them non-cancellable. Goldman Sachs expects five companies to spend $1.2 trillion on AI infrastructure next year. OpenAI is in the same market, buying the same capacity, and its DevDay announcements on Tuesday — always-on agents, a premium speed tier, hosted browser environments for agents — all consume more of it per user, not less.
What to watch
Early-stage talks at this size frequently move, and the figures reported are a target rather than a term sheet. The things that would confirm it are a named anchor investor and a closing announcement. The other question the round raises is what happens to the listing: Altman ruled out 2026 and declined to commit to 2027, and $30 billion of private capital removes most of the pressure to decide.
