OpenAI is targeting at least $30 billion in a new funding round that would value the company at around $1.4 trillion, according to Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources. The discussions are at an early stage and could change.
According to Bloomberg, the round is designed to give OpenAI additional runway while it defers a public listing. CEO Sam Altman has said the company is stepping back from a public offering this year, describing the timing as “ill-advised” given OpenAI’s ongoing work on AI safety. Investors are driving interest in the round, one person said, pointing to the company’s robust revenue momentum.
The $1.4 trillion pre-money valuation would represent a significant step up from OpenAI’s most recent fundraise. The company closed a $122 billion round in March at a post-money valuation of $852 billion — at the time the largest in Silicon Valley history — anchored by SoftBank, Amazon, and Nvidia. The new valuation would also surpass Anthropic’s most recent private market valuation, according to Bloomberg, which previously reported OpenAI had been considering a new round at $1.2 trillion.
The company’s annualized revenue has climbed past $40 billion, a figure that reflects 70% growth since July, Bloomberg reported. The outlet also reported that OpenAI has trimmed some of the usage allowances available to subscribers on its $200 plan.
The fundraising comes as OpenAI has faced pressure over AI safety. OpenAI announced this week that GPT-6.1 Astra, its newest model, would be withheld from release after failing to clear the company’s internal safety bar. Altman has also thrown his support behind a proposal from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei that would pump the brakes on frontier AI development and introduce outside evaluators to assess the technology’s safety.
The company held its annual DevDay developer conference on Tuesday, where it unveiled a new AI agent called Dots and a new $500 paid subscription tier with higher usage limits and faster processing speeds, according to CNBC.
Earlier this year, OpenAI missed its own targets for revenue and new users, raising concern inside the company about sustaining its data center commitments. CFO Sarah Friar had flagged to colleagues that sluggish revenue growth could leave OpenAI unable to honor future computing contracts, and separately raised doubts about the company’s readiness to meet public-market regulatory requirements on Altman’s preferred IPO timeline, according to The Wall Street Journal.