OpenAI Raises $11 Billion at Reported $1.25 Trillion Valuation
OpenAI raised $11 billion in a round that could grow by $9 billion more, Bloomberg reported. The valuation, the backers and what comes next.
OpenAI has raised $11 billion in a new funding round, according to people who told Bloomberg that investors sent the money to the company on Friday. SiliconANGLE, citing that report, said the round is expected to value the ChatGPT maker at $1.25 trillion.
The round is not finished. OpenAI could take in up to $9 billion more in the coming weeks, which would bring the raise close to twice its current size.
Who is investing
The investors were not named. Microsoft is a likely participant: it has joined at least four earlier OpenAI rounds, SiliconANGLE reported. One of those was the $122 billion raise in March, which also included Nvidia, Amazon and about two dozen other backers.
SiliconANGLE’s report gives the valuation as $1.25 trillion in its headline and as $1.25 billion in the body of the story, so the published figures differ.
Why it matters for the coming AI listings
The money lands shortly before a planned public offering by Anthropic. The company is aiming for a $1.5 trillion valuation in its initial public offering, and it is expected to start the IPO process next week, with a listing planned before Thanksgiving. Some Anthropic investors doubt that target. The Wall Street Journal reported that one shareholder suggested a valuation closer to $1 trillion. A $1.25 trillion price for OpenAI would put it on course to pass Anthropic’s market value, SiliconANGLE said.
OpenAI itself plans to go public at some point in 2027. Until then, it has to pay for very large infrastructure bills. The Information reported in July that the company has more than $665 billion in commitments for chips and data centers. To bring down hardware spending over time, OpenAI has built a custom inference chip with Broadcom; inference is the work a model does when it answers a user’s request.
How the two companies are growing
Both firms report fast revenue growth. Anthropic’s IPO filing showed third-quarter revenue up 1,127% from a year earlier. Last month the Financial Times reported that OpenAI ended the same quarter with $50 billion in net annualized revenue, a 77% increase from a year before, with enterprise sales more than doubling.
OpenAI President Greg Brockman said on Wednesday that growth slowed in the first half of the year. It picked up again after the June release of the GPT-5.6 Sol model, he said, and the ChatGPT Work productivity app and the company’s coding tools also helped.
On Thursday the company launched GPT-6 Cyber, a security-focused model for business customers. According to SiliconANGLE, it beats GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI’s most capable general model, on most cybersecurity tasks, and OpenAI engineers used it to build 948 Linux exploits and find 81 high-severity zero-day flaws in Firefox. A zero-day is a software bug that the vendor does not yet know about.
What happens next
The open question for the round is whether OpenAI collects the additional $9 billion over the coming weeks and who the investors turn out to be. For OpenAI’s existing shareholders and employees who hold equity, the reported valuation sets the latest private price for the company ahead of its 2027 listing plans. On the Anthropic side, the IPO roadmap is expected to begin next week.
Source: SiliconANGLE
