OpenAI Seeks to Accelerate a $30 Billion Funding Round Before Anthropic’s IPO

OpenAI is seeking to accelerate a fundraising round of roughly $30 billion before rival Anthropic proceeds with a planned initial public offering, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Reuters. The talks could value OpenAI at more than $1.4 trillion and further separate the largest artificial-intelligence developers from companies unable to finance comparable infrastructure.

The process remains private and unsettled. Reuters reported that OpenAI has discussed participation with SoftBank, Abu Dhabi investor MGX and existing backers. The company wants to complete the transaction before Anthropic’s expected mid-November listing. OpenAI and Anthropic declined to comment, while the prospective investors did not confirm commitments. The size, valuation and timing should therefore be treated as source-reported terms rather than an agreed financing.

The round would follow OpenAI’s $122 billion financing in March, which valued the company at about $852 billion. A new valuation above $1.4 trillion would represent a dramatic increase in seven months. It would also make the financing itself a market event: few private investors can write the multibillion-dollar cheques required without concentrating their exposure to one company and one technological cycle.

OpenAI has told investors that annualised revenue has reached about $50 billion and could rise to $70 billion by year-end, Reuters reported. Annualised revenue extrapolates a current run rate rather than reporting audited sales for a completed year. It can be useful for a fast-growing subscription business, but it says less about durability, margins and cash consumption. The company’s infrastructure commitments remain far larger than the spending profile of a conventional software group.

That capital intensity explains the urgency. Training frontier models, running inference for hundreds of millions of users and securing chips, power and data-centre capacity require long-dated commitments. Raising equity before those bills fall due can protect liquidity and reassure suppliers. It can also dilute existing shareholders and lock investors into assumptions about future demand that have not yet been tested through a full economic cycle.

Anthropic’s expected IPO adds a competitive clock. A public listing would create a quoted valuation for one of OpenAI’s closest rivals and give Anthropic access to public equity markets. If the debut is strong, OpenAI may face a higher benchmark but also more competition for investor capital. If it is weak, private investors may challenge a $1.4 trillion valuation. Completing a round first would let OpenAI set its own terms before that price discovery occurs.

The contest is not simply about model performance. It is becoming a competition over financing capacity, supplier relationships and the ability to convert usage into recurring revenue. SoftBank and MGX already have strategic exposure to AI infrastructure, so participation could deepen a network in which capital providers, compute suppliers and model developers depend on one another. Those links can accelerate construction while making the sector more vulnerable if projected demand disappoints.

Governance also matters. Private financing allows OpenAI to avoid the continuous disclosure required of public companies, even at a valuation comparable with the world’s largest listed groups. Investors must rely on negotiated information rights, while employees and secondary-market holders have limited liquidity. Anthropic’s IPO could increase pressure for more transparent reporting across the sector.

Why it matters

A $30 billion round would show that the frontier-AI race is being financed at sovereign-wealth and mega-fund scale. The beneficiaries include chipmakers, cloud providers, power developers and data-centre operators. The risks fall on investors underwriting enormous valuations before the industry’s long-term economics are clear.

The central uncertainties remain unresolved: no commitments have been confirmed, the valuation may change, revenue figures are company-supplied run rates and Anthropic’s timetable could slip. Until definitive documents are signed, the report is evidence of an active financing contest—not a completed transaction.

Sources: Reuters