OpenAI Takes In $11 Billion at $1.25 Trillion Valuation After Scaling Back Its Round

The valuation is about 47% above the $852 billion OpenAI was valued at when it closed a $122 billion round in March. But the round is smaller and priced lower than the company first sought. Bloomberg said OpenAI had set out to raise $30 billion or more at a $1.4 trillion valuation and cut both targets as AI stocks sold off. The New York Times' DealBook newsletter put the September ambition at as much as $30 billion at a valuation of up to $1.5 trillion, and said the target had since been cut by at least a third.

The pullback matters beyond OpenAI. It is the clearest sign yet that private investors are pricing in the same doubts about AI infrastructure spending that have hit listed chip and cloud stocks, and it arrives days before Anthropic is expected to start marketing what would be a record initial public offering.

OpenAI has not publicly confirmed the size, price or backers of the new round.

Gulf Money Leads

An investor group from the United Arab Emirates that includes MGX, the Abu Dhabi AI investment company, is expected to provide the largest single commitment, in the single-digit billions of dollars, DealBook reported. MGX was among the co-leads of OpenAI's March round alongside SoftBank, Andreessen Horowitz, D.E. Shaw Ventures, TPG and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price.

SoftBank, by contrast, was in talks to put in only hundreds of millions of dollars, far less than its earlier cheques, according to DealBook, which estimated the Japanese group's stake in OpenAI at about 13% after investments of nearly $65 billion. Coatue, which also backs Anthropic, has discussed an investment of a similar size, the newsletter said. Microsoft, which took part in at least four earlier OpenAI rounds, has been named in reports as a possible participant, but no backers of the first close have been confirmed.

Bloomberg said OpenAI spent more than a month negotiating the money after postponing plans for an IPO. Investor sentiment shifted during that time, with concerns about the scale of infrastructure spending and about obstacles to data centre construction after the US midterm elections, in which voters backed restrictions in almost every local ballot measure on data centres.

Revenue and Commitments

OpenAI ended the third quarter with $50 billion in annualised revenue, up 77% from a year earlier, the Financial Times reported last month, with enterprise sales more than doubling. Company president Greg Brockman said this week that growth slowed in the first half of the year before picking up after the June launch of GPT-5.6 Sol, according to SiliconANGLE.

The new cash is meant to help cover heavy infrastructure costs before a listing that OpenAI is planning for 2027. The Information reported in July that the company has more than $665 billion in chip and data centre commitments. OpenAI has also developed a custom inference chip with Broadcom to reduce long-term hardware spending.

The pricing sets a marker for Anthropic, which is aiming for a $1.5 trillion valuation in its IPO. Prospective buyers have discussed figures between $1 trillion and $1.3 trillion, and the company is expected to begin its roadshow next week with a view to listing before the US Thanksgiving holiday on November 26.

The remaining roughly $9 billion of OpenAI's round is expected to come in over the coming weeks, and how much of it arrives will show how far investor appetite has cooled.