OpenAI Has Raised $11B of a New Round at a $1.25T Valuation

TechCrunch reported on Friday, November 6 that OpenAI has raised $11 billion in a new funding round valuing the company at $1.25 trillion, citing Bloomberg, which in turn cited people familiar with the matter. TechCrunch said it had reached out to OpenAI for comment and would update the story if the company responded, so the figures currently rest on Bloomberg's sourcing rather than a company confirmation.

The $11 billion is not a completed round. According to the report, it is part of a larger raise that has not yet closed, is expected to wrap up in the coming weeks, and could total about $20 billion, according to one source cited by Bloomberg. That makes the current number a progress marker rather than a final tally.

The figures also fall well short of what was being discussed two months ago. In late September, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was looking to raise $30 billion in the upcoming round at a $1.4 trillion valuation. Both the amount raised so far and the valuation attached to it sit below that earlier target, and the gap is itself the story.

The same trading day brought a second data point. Bloomberg also reported that potential buyers of shares in rival Anthropic's IPO were eyeing a substantially lower valuation than the company had targeted, with some suggesting it could be as low as $1.1 trillion, compared with the $2 trillion investors were said to expect roughly a month earlier. Two leading labs seeing their pricing expectations soften on the same day points to a shared shift in sentiment.

That sentiment has a concrete political backdrop. TechCrunch notes that the Democratic landslide in the U.S. midterms, and overwhelmingly negative voter sentiment around data centers, has caused jitters throughout the market, with many anticipating regulatory challenges ahead. For companies whose growth plans run through compute and data-center expansion, that is a direct risk variable.

The IPO timetable is equally unsettled. The report recalls that OpenAI previously intimated it would go public this year but subsequently delayed those plans, and that expectations now point to an IPO at some point next year. Private and public pricing are locked together: the terms of this round will anchor how public investors value the business, and the reverse is also true.

Taken together, the fact that both the raise and the valuation landed below September's targets suggests private markets are recalibrating what frontier model companies are worth. The narrative that carried the sector for two years — capital expenditure buys capability leadership, and leadership buys revenue — is now meeting investors who want to see the conversion in between, and who are pricing in the durability of that spending through an election and regulatory cycle.

Three things are worth watching next: the final size, lead investors and valuation of this round; whether Anthropic's IPO pricing gives the sector a new reference point; and whether OpenAI's expected 2027 listing window holds. A change in any one of them would quickly feed back into the fundraising terms available to every other frontier lab.