OpenAI in Talks to Raise $30 Billion at $1.4 Trillion Valuation

OpenAI is negotiating with investors to raise at least $30 billion in a pre-IPO round at a valuation of roughly $1.4 trillion, Bloomberg reported on Tuesday.

The figure is striking on its own terms. If the round closes at that price, OpenAI would be worth nearly 64% more than it was just six months ago, when it raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation. That March round was meant to be the company's last private raise before going public. It won't be.

The dynamics behind the new talks reveal a company whose commercial momentum has accelerated even as its timeline for a listing has slipped.

The revenue engine

According to Bloomberg's report, OpenAI's run-rate revenue jumped 70% since July, reaching $40 billion in August. The report attributes that surge to a strategic refocus on key areas — coding chief among them.

The numbers matter for the valuation math. A $1.4 trillion price against a $40 billion run-rate implies investors are paying roughly 35 times annualized revenue for a company whose top line is compounding at double-digit monthly rates. That multiple is aggressive by any historical standard for software or internet businesses. It is, however, consistent with the premium that late-stage private investors have shown they will pay for exposure to the leading AI franchise ahead of a public debut.

The competitive context also frames the raise. Anthropic momentarily outpaced OpenAI at the start of the year, according to the report — an unusual setback for the ChatGPT maker. The recovery since then, driven by the refocus on coding and other priority products, appears to have restored investor confidence in OpenAI's ability to defend its lead.

A bridge to a delayed IPO

Bloomberg reports that the new fundraising, if it transpires, will serve as a bridge round to the IPO. That language tells the story of a changed plan.

Until recently, the public debut was expected this year. The March round at $852 billion was structured as the final private raise before that listing. CEO Sam Altman has now ruled out a public debut in 2026, choosing instead to prioritize AI safety.

Altman's reasoning, laid out in a recent interview with Fortune, was unusually blunt for a chief executive positioning his company for the largest technology IPO on record.

"I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade," Altman told Fortune. He was responding to warnings from safety researchers about AI posing an existential risk to humanity.

The comment cuts two ways. For safety advocates, it signals that the most valuable private company in the AI sector is at least rhetorically engaging with catastrophic-risk concerns. For investors, it introduces a governance question: a CEO who cites existential risk as a reason to delay an IPO may weigh factors beyond pure shareholder return when setting the listing timeline.

The investor calculus

Investors, per the report, are eager to pour more funds into OpenAI ahead of its anticipated public market debut next year. That eagerness persists despite — or perhaps because of — the delay.

Private shares bought now at a $1.4 trillion valuation offer a discount to whatever the market might price post-IPO, at least in investors' modeling. The risk, of course, is that $1.4 trillion already prices in much of the upside, and that a delayed listing extends the period during which those shares remain illiquid. Altman has already pushed the debut beyond one original schedule. He could push it again.

The scale of the numbers involved also concentrates the capital markets story. A $30 billion raise would be among the largest private funding rounds ever attempted, and it would arrive at a valuation that would place OpenAI among the most valuable companies in the world — public or private — before it has sold a single share on an exchange.

OpenAI did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment on the reported talks. Neither company has confirmed the negotiations, and Bloomberg's report notes the round may not transpire.

For now, the market signal is clear: institutional capital still wants exposure to OpenAI at prices that would have seemed implausible two years ago, and the company is willing to keep tapping that demand while it resolves the safety questions its own CEO has placed at the center of the IPO decision.