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OpenAI Reportedly in Talks for New Funding as IPO Delayed but Cash Burn Continues
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- DeepHorus
According to media reports citing people familiar with the matter, ChatGPT developer OpenAI is in preliminary discussions with investors about a new funding round that could value the company at $1.2 trillion. If this figure ultimately materializes, it would set a record for valuation in a primary-market financing in the AI industry. The people familiar stressed that the talks are still at an early stage, that the final valuation figure could still change significantly in the coming months, and that any decision to move forward with this funding round will depend on OpenAI finalizing its IPO timing.
This potential funding round comes right after OpenAI'sε―ι release of new models. In July of this year, the company launched GPT-5.6; earlier this month, it released a large model codenamed Astra. The successive launches of new products reversed the relatively slow growth momentum at the start of the year and drove an acceleration in the company's revenue growth. Buoyed by this, OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate (ARR) last month surpassed $40 billion, up about 20% month-on-month, becoming the core narrative supporting the high valuation.
Compared with its financing in March this year, the new target valuation represents a sharp jump. At that time, OpenAI completed a $122 billion financing at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. People familiar with the matter revealed that the financing discussions were initiated by investors, not by OpenAI. In addition, OpenAI confidentially filed its IPO prospectus in June this year, but subsequently delayed its listing timetable, making private funding the only channel for replenishing capital in the short term.
From a technical perspective, OpenAI's valuation logic is still built on the scaling path of large models. GPT-5.6's improvements in multimodal understanding and inference efficiency, as well as Astra's progress in long-context and tool-calling capabilities, both imply greater consumption of training clusters and inference compute. People familiar with the matter said bluntly that OpenAI "needs capital," because the company has burned tens of billions of dollars in recent years to train models, with spending alone reaching $34 billion last year. Some analyses point out that the cost of a single training run for a frontier model has entered the billion-dollar range, while day-to-day inference-side expenses scale up in tandem with user growth, making the pace of financing almost determine the pace of product iteration.
If this financing is completed, the most direct impact would be a rebalancing of the investor structure. It would provide long-term supporters such as SoftBank and Thrive Capital with opportunities to increase their stakes, but at the same time mean these investors must wait longer to obtain huge returns through an IPO. For internal employees, the window for realizing equity liquidity would be pushed further back, and the value of options in the compensation structure would need to be recalculated at a higher valuation. For competitors, OpenAI's replenished ammunition would directly intensify the competition for compute and talent.
Reactions from various parties show clear divergence. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that an IPO is still being prepared, but the company will not go public this year. He pointed out that, against the backdrop of growing concerns about the existential risks brought by AI, going public at this time would be "an unwise time." Investors appear more positive; the fact that they proactively initiated financing discussions itself shows that primary-market demand for allocating to leading AI assets remains strong. Some analysts believe that delaying the IPO and replenishing funds through private placement can maintain expansion speed while avoiding public-market scrutiny, but it also further reduces valuation transparency.
Looking ahead, this funding round will directly change the valuation rankings of leading AI companies. OpenAI's main competitor Anthropic reached a valuation of $965 billion after completing financing in May this year, briefly surpassing OpenAI and triggering investor doubts about OpenAI's development direction. If the new funding round is completed, OpenAI's valuation will once again exceed its rival's. Meanwhile, according to media reports last week, Anthropic is expected to achieve adjusted profitability for a second consecutive quarter and is expected to go public as early as October, with a target valuation of about $2 trillion, as competition between the two sides extends from model capabilities to the capital markets.
Against the macroeconomic backdrop, this financing race reflects the highly capital-intensive nature of the AI industry. Research and development of frontier models is no longer purely a technical issue, but a composite contest involving capital, compute, energy, and talent. The primary market continues to concentrate toward the top, while the secondary-market listing window is repeatedly delayed due to valuation disagreements and regulatory scrutiny. For OpenAI, whether it can use private funding to maintain technological leadership before an IPO will determine its position in the next round of industry reshuffling.
