OpenAI is in talks for a new funding round of at least $30 billion at a pre-money valuation of about $1.4 trillion. The news broke on September 29, 2026, first reported by Bloomberg and followed by Reuters. Discussions are still at an early stage and terms could change, but the round is reportedly driven by investor demand.
The shape of the deal is clear: bridge financing. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this month that the company will not go public in 2026, citing AI safety (when he confirmed the 2026 IPO delay, this site analyzed how AI safety is rewriting the company's capital playbook). His widely quoted line to Fortune was, roughly, that it is unacceptable to go public while carrying something like "a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade." With the IPO postponed, expansion capital has to come from private markets.
Valuation up 60% in six months, backed by revenue
Back in March, OpenAI closed a round with $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion valuation — billed at the time as its "last private raise before an IPO." Six months later the quoted valuation has jumped from $852 billion to $1.4 trillion, a gain of more than 60%.
Revenue is doing the talking. A separate Reuters report the same day said OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate is nearing $70 billion, up more than 70% since the start of the third quarter, with enterprise revenue more than doubling. Bloomberg's mid-August figure had the run rate just past $40 billion — nearly $30 billion added in about six weeks. TechCrunch's read of the reporting is that the growth comes mainly from a renewed focus on high-value product lines like code generation.
$1.4 trillion against a $70 billion run rate works out to roughly a 20x price-to-sales multiple. Whether that is expensive is debatable, but at least it is not a valuation built on storytelling alone.
The money most likely flows into compute
OpenAI did not respond to Reuters' request for comment, and no official use of proceeds has been disclosed. But the context points one way: inference and training compute is the company's biggest cost line. Oracle is building compute capacity for OpenAI, and analysts say the ChatGPT maker accounts for around half of Oracle's compute backlog — Oracle shares rose nearly 4% on the day the funding news broke.
The more telling detail is the word "bridge." The previous $122 billion round was supposed to be the last one; now another $30 billion is on the table, which suggests OpenAI is burning capital faster than its earlier financing plan assumed. Anthropic is heading toward an IPO with a prospectus showing a $42 billion net loss last year — the whole top tier is running the same "burn cash for scale" playbook; OpenAI is just choosing to keep burning in private markets.
What it means for ordinary users
In the short term, if the round closes, the most direct effect is that product iteration will not run out of money: compute-hungry products like ChatGPT and Codex can keep scaling. The service stability behind 1.2 billion weekly users and 2.5 million enterprise customers (both figures OpenAI disclosed at its developer day) is ultimately underwritten by capital spending.
Longer term, skipping a 2026 IPO while raising huge private rounds turns "safety over capital-market tempo" from a slogan into a financial reality. Investors willing to keep writing checks with no IPO exit timeline are, for now, buying that narrative. But how long a 20x sales multiple and multi-tens-of-billions in annual loss-making expansion can last will be tested at the next raise.
