OpenAI is close to raising $30 billion, at a lower price than it first asked for

OpenAI is close to raising up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation, $150 billion below the price it was pitching to investors just over two weeks ago. Investors from the United Arab Emirates are leading the round alongside the hedge fund Coatue, CNBC reported on Thursday, citing people familiar with the deal who asked not to be named because the details are confidential.

The $1.25 trillion figure is a pre-money valuation, meaning it doesn’t count the new cash. If the full $30 billion comes in, OpenAI would be valued at about $1.28 trillion once the round closes. According to CNBC, OpenAI told investors on Thursday that it wants signatures by the end of next week, and the final size of the round is still being decided. OpenAI hasn’t commented publicly on the report.

A lower price than OpenAI asked for

On October 5, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was seeking at least $30 billion and had put a $1.4 trillion pre-money valuation in front of investors as a fixed price, even though it hadn’t settled on a lead investor. That is unusual: in most venture rounds, investors propose the terms and haggle with the company over the price and who leads. Bloomberg said several UAE funds, including Abu Dhabi’s MGX, had discussed putting in as much as $10 billion between them, and that BlackRock was also in talks to join. OpenAI and BlackRock declined to comment at the time.

The price now being reported is about 11% lower than that pitch. It would still be a big jump on OpenAI’s last round, which closed in March: $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation including the new money, the largest private funding round Silicon Valley has seen. MGX, SoftBank and Andreessen Horowitz were among the investors who co-led that deal. A $1.25 trillion starting price is about 47% higher than where that round left the company, seven months later.

CNBC also reported that, alongside the investment, OpenAI is negotiating a commercial deal to get more computing capacity from the UAE, according to one person. It didn’t give the size or terms of that arrangement.

A bridge to the stock market

The people told CNBC the round is being positioned as an “opportunistic” bridge ahead of a possible initial public offering. OpenAI has filed confidentially to go public, and its finance chief, Sarah Friar, has told employees a listing will likely come in 2027, CNBC said. That would put to rest a prediction from Palantir’s Alex Karp, who said last month that OpenAI will never go public.

A bridge round keeps the money coming in while OpenAI waits, and its timing puts it right next to its biggest rival’s IPO. Anthropic has also filed confidentially, and a reported draft of its prospectus shows it made $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026 and lost $80.7 billion. Wall Street has been debating whether it is worth as much as $2 trillion, well above the price OpenAI is now being offered privately.

Raising money in a jittery market

The talks are happening during what CNBC called a “choppy time” for tech markets, with jitters around the AI cloud company CoreWeave and questions over how easy it will be to borrow as interest rates rise. Anthropic’s listing will be another test of how much investors are still willing to pay for AI companies.

MadRobot’s own AI bubble checklist already had three of its nine warning signs flashing red last week. A top AI lab agreeing to a lower price than it asked for, even one that still values it above $1 trillion, is the kind of signal that list was built to track.

Why it matters

OpenAI set the price for its own round and, if CNBC’s sources are right, the market pushed it down by $150 billion. It will still be one of the most valuable private companies ever, but the gap between what AI labs ask for and what investors will pay is starting to show, just as Anthropic tests public markets.

Sources: CNBC; Bloomberg.