OpenAI is closing in on a funding round of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, a deal its investors are being asked to sign by the end of next week. The round is co-led by investors from the United Arab Emirates and by Coatue, according to people familiar with the arrangement.
The figure does not include the new capital being raised. OpenAI declined to comment.
The financing is being described internally as an "opportunistic" bridge rather than a conventional growth round, and it sits ahead of a listing that the company's chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, has told employees is likely in 2027. OpenAI filed confidentially for an initial public offering in June.
A number that keeps moving
The $1.25 trillion is lower than the figures that circulated earlier in the autumn. Bloomberg reported on September 29 that the company was seeking at least $30 billion at a valuation of roughly $1.4 trillion; The New York Times had reported on September 16 that OpenAI was considering a round in the region of $1.5 trillion. That the ask has come down while the size of the raise has held steady is the more informative detail: the capital requirement is fixed, the price is not.
For scale, the company raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion post-money valuation. A round at $1.25 trillion pre-money would represent an increase of roughly 71 percent on the March pre-money figure, inside seven months, and would make OpenAI the most valuable private company on record.
Reuters reported that OpenAI wants commitments secured before Anthropic's IPO disclosures invite direct comparison between the two companies. Anthropic is expected to list in November and is said to be seeking a valuation of $1.5 trillion to $2 trillion, with some investors arguing for a figure nearer $1.5 trillion on questions about its growth trajectory. Anthropic raised $65 billion at a $965 billion valuation in May.
The compute clause
Attached to the financing is a separate commercial negotiation: an agreement that would secure additional computing capacity for OpenAI out of the United Arab Emirates. The two are being discussed in parallel, according to one person familiar with the matter, and the logic is straightforward. A valuation is a claim about future capability; capability is a function of compute; and the marginal constraint on OpenAI's compute supply is no longer capital but power, land and chips in jurisdictions willing to host them.
The Gulf has been the most aggressive seller of all three.
A choppy market
The round lands in unsettled conditions. There have been jitters around CoreWeave, the GPU cloud whose fortunes are read as a proxy for AI infrastructure demand, and questions about the cost and availability of financing as interest rates rise. For a company raising at a trillion-dollar-plus valuation, the relevant risk is not that investors will refuse the price but that they will demand terms — structure, preference, or a guarantee — that constrain the eventual listing.
OpenAI's answer so far has been speed: sign now, before the comparison set widens.
What the round does not settle
Three things remain open. The final size is undetermined and could still change. The valuation is pre-money, so the effective price per share depends on terms not disclosed. And the round does not resolve the underlying question a public market will eventually ask, which is whether revenue growth justifies the multiple.
Reports have put OpenAI's annualised revenue at roughly $40 billion as of August. Against a $1.25 trillion valuation that is a multiple of about thirty-one times annualised revenue — for a company that is also, by its own disclosures, spending heavily on compute and carrying substantial commitments to infrastructure partners.
The bridge, in other words, gets OpenAI across to an IPO. It does not tell anyone what the other side looks like.