Reuters reported exclusively on October 19 that OpenAI is accelerating a new funding round of about $30 billion, targeting a post-money valuation above $1.4 trillion — far higher than the $852 billion valuation in its March raise. The key is the timeline: OpenAI wants to close the round before rival Anthropic's expected mid-November IPO.
Point 1: The rush motive — set the price before the comparison. Both companies are courting sovereign wealth funds and long-only institutional investors at the same time, competing for the same pool of capital. Once Anthropic lists, it must disclose detailed financials, giving investors a ready-made valuation yardstick. OpenAI wants to lock in commitments before those disclosures to keep pricing power in its own hands.
Point 2: A revenue story to back the valuation. OpenAI has told potential investors that annualized revenue reached about $50 billion following the GPT-6 Astra launch and could hit $70 billion by year-end. The money will go mainly into compute and datacenter expansion, stockpiling ammunition for the next round of the model race.
Point 3: The investor lineup is nearly set. Existing backers SoftBank and Abu Dhabi's sovereign investor MGX are in talks to join. Sources say a raise of this size usually takes months; OpenAI has sharply compressed the deal timetable.
This is the first head-to-head clash between AI giants over the "funding window": one accelerating a private raise to lock in capital, the other sprinting to a public listing to set its price. Whoever secures this trillion-dollar war chest first takes the lead in the next round of the compute and model race.
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