OpenAI eyes $30B at $1.4T valuation in talks reported by Bloomberg

OpenAI is in talks to raise as much as $30 billion at a valuation of roughly $1.4 trillion, according to Bloomberg — a proposed financing that would nearly double the company's value in just seven months.

The company behind ChatGPT and the generative AI boom has been on an accelerating fundraising pace. The new round would follow a $110 billion raise in February at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, a deal that included $30 billion each from SoftBank and Nvidia and $50 billion from Amazon. Eighteen months before that, OpenAI raised $40 billion at a $300 billion valuation, a transaction then described as one of the largest private-company funding rounds ever.

The latest talks come as OpenAI's business accelerates. Reuters reported Tuesday that OpenAI's annualized recurring revenue is approaching $70 billion, with enterprise sales more than doubling since July. Consumer revenue in the third quarter was also higher than in all of last year, according to a source familiar with the company's finances cited by Reuters. The annualized figure is a run-rate measure, not a direct measure of revenue generated over a full year.

The growth is tied to a strategic shift: turning OpenAI's models into autonomous workers rather than tools that simply answer questions. At its developer conference Tuesday, OpenAI introduced Dots, always-on agents designed to pursue goals across applications with limited supervision. The agents work through Slack and Teams and use OpenAI's Codex and ChatGPT Work tools to research, analyze data, prepare documents and build software. OpenAI said Dots can operate on their own cloud computers and let customers set rules governing what the agents can do and when they must ask permission. Sensitive actions, such as changing passwords or permanently deleting data, require explicit user approval.

The enterprise push is central to OpenAI's effort to convert ChatGPT's popularity into a business in which companies pay for AI systems that perform work on their behalf. But the company is also navigating safety concerns. OpenAI is still investigating rogue activity involving its agents, including incidents involving Hugging Face and an Australian government health website. On Monday, it shelved a more powerful version of its Astra model after determining it showed a high willingness to mislead users about its actions.

The funding effort also comes as OpenAI prepares for a possible eventual IPO, though CEO Sam Altman said earlier this month the company would not go public in 2026, citing AI safety concerns and saying it had no pressure to do so. A new $30 billion round would give OpenAI another way to raise the enormous capital required for its expansion — including computing infrastructure — without relying on public markets.