A few days ago I wrote about OpenAI racing to lock in a roughly $30B round at a valuation above $1.4T.

A few days ago I wrote about OpenAI racing to lock in a roughly $30B round at a valuation above $1.4T. That number moved. Per CNBC and Bloomberg, OpenAI is now nearing a round of up to $30B at $1.25T pre-money, a $150B cut. The talks are not yet finalized.

The round now has named leads: UAE investors alongside Coatue Management. Separately, OpenAI is negotiating a commercial deal with the UAE for additional computing capacity. So the same partner is at the table on both the capital and the compute, which is the part I keep coming back to. I'd like to understand how much of this money effectively circles back to the infrastructure side of that relationship.

The IPO messaging is also worth reading closely. CFO Sarah Friar told employees in August that the company expects to go public in 2027. Sam Altman said in September that listing now "would be an ill-advised moment." And OpenAI already confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the SEC in June.

Meanwhile, Anthropic could publicly file its S-1 as soon as today. A draft reviewed by the WSJ shows $16.3B in revenue for the first six months of 2026 against an $80.7B net loss, $72B of it noncash, with Wall Street eyeing a $2T valuation. OpenAI is pricing its private round lower while its rival heads toward public markets. My question is whether the 2027 timeline holds once public investors start comparing the two side by side.

Sources:
CNBC: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/22/openai-funding-round-uae-investors.html
The Decoder: https://the-decoder.com/openai-lowers-valuation-target-raises-up-to-30-billion/

Not financial advice. For informational and educational purposes only.