OpenAI is near the finish line on as much as $30B in fresh capital at a $1.25T valuation before the new money lands, with investors from the United Arab Emirates and Coatue named as lead backers by people familiar with the talks.
The structure matters more than the headline. OpenAI is describing it as an opportunistic bridge rather than a priced round ahead of an initial public offering, and it pressed investors on Thursday for signatures inside a week, with the final figure still being settled.
Conversations began in September, after existing backers approached the company with proposals. A commercial agreement being negotiated alongside the equity would secure additional computing capacity from the UAE. That sits on top of a February target of roughly $600B in total compute spending by 2030.
The calendar is awkward. A confidential prospectus went to regulators in June with no date attached. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar told staff in August the company would be public in 2027, and chief executive Sam Altman said a month later that going public right now would be ill-advised.
Rival Anthropic has advanced further into investor meetings and is reported to want a valuation between $1.5T and $2T. It closed a $65B round in May that valued the company at $965B, a bar OpenAI’s bridge capital does not yet clear in scale of committed equity.
The spread between the two valuations, and the willingness of sovereign funds to back a still-private company at this scale, is the number to watch. Neither firm has said what it will actually list at.
