Report: OpenAI closing on $30B ‘bridge’ funding round to tide it over before IPO
SiliconANGLE Mike Wheatley ● Covered by 4 sources
OpenAI is said to be close to a $30B funding round. It would push its value to $1.25T and buy time before an IPO.
Based on reporting by SiliconANGLE, Mike Wheatley — read the original for the full story.
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OpenAI is still trying to raise giant private money even as it inches toward the public markets. A CNBC report says the company is negotiating an additional $30 billion investment that would value it at $1.25 trillion, which would put it at the top of the private-company heap.
The money is being framed as a bridge, not a fresh strategic detour. Investors from the United Arab Emirates are expected to lead the round, with Coatue also likely to take part. CNBC says OpenAI wants the papers signed by the end of next week, though the final size still hasn’t been locked down.
That would make this round much smaller than OpenAI’s last major raise in March, when it pulled in $122 billion from backers including Amazon, SoftBank and Nvidia at an $852 billion post-money valuation. The company later filed a confidential prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June as it worked on an IPO.
But the public listing has stopped looking imminent. In August, CFO Sarah Friar told employees OpenAI would be a public company in 2027, then Sam Altman said less than a month later that going public this year would be ill-advised. That hesitation has opened a lane for Anthropic, which is reportedly pushing ahead with its own IPO plans and a valuation target between $1.5 trillion and $2.5 trillion.
The UAE talks may also come with a commercial angle. OpenAI is reportedly discussing a separate deal that would give it more compute capacity in the Middle East. For a company this hungry for infrastructure, cash and chips seem to be arriving in the same conversation.
My take — AI-written commentary, not fact-checked reporting
This is what AI funding looks like when the numbers stop being about growth and start being about gravity. OpenAI isn’t just raising money; it’s building a financial airlock before the IPO doors open. The amusing part is that “bridge round” now sounds normal for sums that would have once looked like a typo.
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