OpenAI is reportedly in early talks for a private funding round at a valuation of $1.2 trillion, ahead of a planned IPO. Or $1.5 trillion, depending which outlet you read: Bloomberg and the FT say $1.2 trillion, the New York Times says $1.5 trillion. That is a $300 billion discrepancy, a rounding error larger than the entire market value of most blue-chip companies, and the fact that nobody can pin it down tells you something about the strange air up here. When your margin of error is bigger than Netflix, the numbers have left the atmosphere.
The figures a retail investor should actually weigh
Behind the headline sits a genuinely eye-watering picture. OpenAI raised $122 billion at an $852 billion valuation back in March, filed confidentially for an IPO in June, and Sam Altman has said the listing is unlikely before 2027. Its revenue run rate is around $40 billion a year, which is enormous, but the company is not expected to be profitable until 2030. So the case for a trillion-plus valuation rests almost entirely on future growth, not present profit.
The contrast with Anthropic is the sharpest way to see it. Anthropic is reportedly eyeing an IPO at around a $2 trillion valuation, runs at a higher revenue rate (~$65 billion) and may already be profitable. Two companies, both claiming valuations that would make them among the most valuable on earth, neither yet public, both burning through the kind of capital that used to build national infrastructure. The bull case is that these are the foundational platforms of the next computing era and cheap at any price. The bear case is that a $300 billion “who knows” in the headline valuation is exactly what a top looks like.
The takeaway
You cannot buy OpenAI shares yet, so the practical relevance is as a signal, not a trade. And the signal is that private-market AI valuations have reached a point where a third of a trillion dollars is a reporting footnote. That is either the birth of the most important companies of the century or a warning sign flashing in very large numbers, and honestly, it can be both at once for a while before anyone finds out which. Watch the eventual IPO price and the profitability date, not the private-round rumours. (Not investment advice; do your own research.)
Related: is Nvidia a bubble or a bargain?