OpenAI Closes In on $30 Billion Round That Would Value It at $1.25 Trillion

OpenAI is on the verge of locking in a funding round that would value the company at $1.25 trillion, according to people familiar with the deal cited by CNBC. The company is raising up to $30 billion, and investors from the United Arab Emirates are leading the round alongside the investment firm Coatue, the people said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because the terms haven't been made public.

The $1.25 trillion figure doesn't include the new money being raised. OpenAI reportedly told investors on Thursday that it wants signatures locked in by the end of next week, though the final size of the round hasn't been settled yet.

What makes this round notable isn't just the number, though a $1.25 trillion valuation is itself striking for a company that didn't exist in its current form a decade ago. It's how OpenAI is describing the raise: as an "opportunistic" bridge, according to people familiar with the deal. In plain terms, that means OpenAI isn't necessarily raising this money because it's desperate for cash right now. It's raising it because the opportunity presented itself, and because it wants a cushion heading into a much bigger event — a potential initial public offering.

The IPO clock is ticking

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has told employees that a public listing will likely happen in 2027, and the company has already filed confidentially to go public. A confidential filing lets a company start the regulatory process with the SEC without tipping its hand publicly, buying time to prepare before an eventual announcement.

That timeline frames this funding round as a warm-up act. Bridge financing like this typically exists to keep a company flush with cash and give it room to grow its numbers before it faces the scrutiny of public markets. At a $1.25 trillion valuation, OpenAI would already be sitting in rarefied territory, on par with or ahead of some of the most valuable public companies in the world. Whether that valuation survives contact with Wall Street is the real question an IPO would answer.

Why the UAE, specifically

The involvement of UAE investors is the detail worth sitting with. According to one person familiar with the matter, OpenAI is also negotiating a separate commercial deal that would give it access to more computing capacity from the UAE. That's not incidental to the funding round. It points to a broader pattern in AI right now: the companies building the most advanced models need staggering amounts of computing power, and Gulf states with deep sovereign wealth and ambitions to become AI infrastructure hubs are positioning themselves as both funders and suppliers.

For OpenAI, pairing capital with compute access in the same relationship is efficient. Training and running frontier AI models requires enormous data center capacity, and securing more of it directly supports the company's ability to keep building and serving its products. For the UAE, backing OpenAI at this scale — both financially and infrastructurally — is a bet on staying central to the AI economy as it matures.

A shaky backdrop for tech financing

This round isn't happening in a vacuum. CNBC's reporting notes that the fundraising is coming together during a rougher stretch for tech markets, with jitters around CoreWeave, the cloud computing company that's become a bellwether for AI infrastructure spending, and broader unease about financing conditions as interest rates climb. Higher rates generally make investors more cautious about big, speculative bets, and AI valuations have been exactly that kind of bet for the past couple of years.

Against that backdrop, OpenAI pulling together a round this large, at a valuation this high, says something about how much appetite still exists for the company specifically, even if confidence in the broader AI financing landscape is wobblier. It also raises the stakes for what comes next. Anthropic, OpenAI's closest rival and fellow frontier AI lab, is expected to pursue its own IPO, and that listing will serve as another real-world test of whether investors are willing to pay AI-sized multiples once a company's books are fully public.

What to watch

The immediate marker is whether OpenAI actually gets signatures on this round by its stated target of next week. After that, the size of the round itself matters: OpenAI is reportedly still determining how much of that $30 billion ceiling it will actually raise. And looming over all of it is 2027, the year Friar has pointed to for a public listing. Every funding round between now and then will be read, at least in part, as a rehearsal for that moment — a chance for OpenAI to show it can keep raising money and deploying computing power at a scale that justifies a valuation most of the business world is still getting used to.