OpenAI reportedly working on $30B raise at a $1.25T valuation

OpenAI is working on a new funding round of roughly $30 billion at a valuation of about $1.25 trillion, according to a TechCrunch report published on October 22, with the raise taking shape ahead of the company's planned IPO.

The report frames the scale plainly: should OpenAI close a round above a $1 trillion valuation, it would break records as the most highly valued private company ever. Numbers of that size have generally been reserved for a handful of listed giants, not for the terms of a private financing.

The wording matters as much as the figure. TechCrunch describes the company as working on the round, which leaves room for the size, the valuation and the investor list to change before anything is signed. In private markets, the gap between talks and a closed deal is usually measured in weeks of diligence and paperwork.

The size of the ask reflects the cost structure of the current AI race. Training and serving frontier models, along with the data centres behind them, require sustained capital expenditure, and the trend in recent years has been toward larger commitments per training run. For a lab at OpenAI's scale, access to capital has become a competitive asset in its own right.

Timing is the second signal. A large private round ahead of an IPO is often read as a way to set a valuation anchor before public investors weigh in, giving existing shareholders a reference point and the company a benchmark for later pricing. The report does not detail how the round lines up against the listing timetable.

If the round closes on the terms reported, OpenAI would become the most valuable private company in history and push the capital threshold for leading AI labs up by another order of magnitude.

Three things are worth watching from here: the final size and valuation, who ends up on the cap table, and where the money is explicitly directed. For now the report supplies the headline figures and the IPO context; the rest remains to be disclosed.