OpenAI Nears a $1.25 Trillion Price Tag and the UAE Is Writing the Cheque

Seven months ago OpenAI was worth $852 billion. Now, if a deal CNBC says is close to the finish line gets signed, the ChatGPT maker will be priced at $1.25 trillion before a single new dollar hits its account, and Gulf money will be holding the pen.

According to CNBC's report on Thursday, OpenAI is nearing a funding round of up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation. Investors from the United Arab Emirates are leading the round alongside Coatue, CNBC reported, citing people familiar with the deal who asked not to be named because the details were confidential. Those people described the money as an "opportunistic" bridge ahead of a potential IPO.

Nothing is signed yet. CNBC reported that OpenAI told investors on Thursday it is aiming to secure signatures by the end of next week, and that the final size of the round is still being determined. OpenAI declined to comment, according to TechCrunch.

Read that number again, because it is a discount. Earlier this month Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was seeking at least $30 billion at a valuation of about $1.4 trillion, with UAE funds including Abu Dhabi's MGX discussing as much as $10 billion collectively. If CNBC's figures hold, OpenAI has shaved roughly $150 billion off its asking price in a few weeks. For most companies that would be a story about cooling demand. For OpenAI it is still a jump of nearly 50% on the March round, when it raised $122 billion at $852 billion.

Money and compute from the same desert

The more interesting detail may be the one tucked further down. Alongside the investment, OpenAI is negotiating a commercial deal that would secure more computing capacity from the UAE, CNBC reported, citing one person. That would make the Emirates both a lead investor and a supplier of the computing power its spending plans depend on. CNBC also noted that OpenAI told investors in February it is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spend by 2030. When your shopping list is that long, a backer who can also sell you capacity is worth more than a cheque alone.

It also sharpens an old question about who really holds leverage over frontier AI. A round led by Gulf investors, paired with a compute arrangement with the same country, ties OpenAI's growth more tightly to a single foreign partner just as it prepares to open its books to public markets.

Then there is the IPO itself, which OpenAI's own leaders have described in conflicting tones. CNBC reported that the company confidentially filed its prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June but has not said when it plans to list. CFO Sarah Friar told employees in August that the lab "will be a public company in 2027," according to CNBC. A month later, CEO Sam Altman struck a very different note.

"Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public." Sam Altman, OpenAI CEO, as quoted by CNBC

A private bridge at a trillion-dollar price is one way to square those two statements. It buys time, keeps the valuation climbing on paper, and spares OpenAI from public market scrutiny for now.

The timing matters too. Anthropic, OpenAI's chief rival, also filed confidentially in June and is meeting prospective investors, CNBC reported, and is said to be seeking a valuation between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion when it lists. Anthropic closed a $65 billion round at a $965 billion valuation in May. As we noted last week, investors were already reconsidering Anthropic's $2 trillion ambitions. TechCrunch pointed out that a $1.25 trillion private mark for OpenAI would set the bar even higher for its own eventual listing, and could ripple into how Anthropic gets priced.

So the scoreboard, for the moment, reads like this. OpenAI wants to be the most valuable private company ever, Anthropic wants to beat it in public, and the money deciding the gap is increasingly coming from Abu Dhabi. Whether that $1.25 trillion figure survives until signatures arrive next week is the part nobody has confirmed yet.