Reports

OpenAI Needs Fresh Capital After Shelving Its IPO, Reportedly at a $1.2 Trillion Valuation

co-written by newsrooms.ai21. September 2026, 17:20

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. © WEF, Collage Trending Topics

OpenAI will stay private for now. CEO Sam Altman recently pushed the long awaited listing back to 2027 at the earliest, pointing to the state of the AI safety debate: going public would come at an “ill-advised moment,” and there is still “a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety.” That removes, at least temporarily, the capital source the company had counted on to help fund its data center buildout.

Private money is meant to fill the gap. According to a Financial Times report, OpenAI is in early talks about a new funding round at a valuation of more than $1.2 trillion (roughly 1.05 trillion euros). Nothing has been settled so far, and neither the size of the round nor the investors are known.

How the New Valuation Compares With the Last Round

For context, OpenAI closed a record round of $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation this past March, that time with an allocation for retail investors as well. The $1.2 trillion now being floated works out to a gain of about 41 percent in half a year.

An internal presentation quoted by the Financial Times explains why more money is needed so soon. OpenAI expects a cumulative negative free cash flow of $278 billion between 2026 and the end of 2030. Revenue is projected to climb from around $36 billion this year to roughly $350 billion in 2030, while spending on compute capacity runs well ahead of those earnings.

The cost of that growth for backers is visible at the company’s largest single investor. Softbank is issuing dollar and euro bonds totaling $11.15 billion (9.73 billion euros) with maturities between three and a half and seven and a half years to buy more OpenAI shares, Reuters reported, citing the term sheet. The proceeds finance a third tranche of $10 billion that replaces a bridge loan. In total, the Japanese investor plans to commit up to $30 billion. Fitch rates the new paper “BB+,” which places it in speculative territory.

Anthropic and Google Set the Benchmark

At the top of the market, the gap has narrowed. Anthropic raised $65 billion in a Series H at a post-money valuation of $965 billion, putting it above OpenAI’s standing valuation. In February the figure was still $380 billion. The company reports annualized revenue of more than $47 billion, guides toward roughly 130 percent growth and expects its first operating profit. A stock market debut is anticipated before the end of the year.

Google, meanwhile, is pressing OpenAI where its valuation comes from: end users. Gemini and ChatGPT have both reached around one billion users, putting the two roughly level. Google can distribute its models through Search, Android and Workspace, and with its own TPUs it owns the infrastructure that OpenAI has to finance on the capital markets.

Two Challengers Coming From the Side

Alongside the task of keeping pace at the frontier sits a second one: holding off two well funded challengers that approach from different directions.

The first is Elon Musk’s group. After merging xAI into SpaceX and acquiring Anysphere (Cursor) for $60 billion in stock, SpaceXAI launched Grok Bot in August, a service built around persistent, named agents running on a cloud machine. The bots sign into the user’s existing tools, keep working once the laptop is closed, and come back only when a human decision is required. Distribution runs as an add-on through SuperGrok Heavy and Cursor subscriptions, which means it lands directly with a paying developer base.

The second is Meta. The company introduced Muse, a consumer agent that sends emails, books travel, fills out forms and makes purchases through a Stripe Link integration. Muse runs on the web, on iOS and Android and inside WhatsApp, with an integration into Meta’s AI glasses announced. Alongside a free tier there are plans at $20 and $100 a month (about 17 and 87 euros), and Meta itself expects most users to stay on the free tier. Documents cited by The Information indicate that an agent will also run directly inside Instagram, reaching more than two billion daily active users with no installation required.

The Real Calculation

For OpenAI the starting position has shifted on two fronts at once. On the models themselves it competes with two houses that are either valued higher or already own their data centers. In the mass market it faces rivals that push their agents through existing subscriptions and apps instead of winning users one at a time.

An IPO would have delivered fresh capital and a tradable stock to use as acquisition currency. Both now have to come from the private market, at a valuation that prices in a multiple of 2030 revenue. Whether investors are willing to pay that price should become clear over the coming months.