Analysis
OpenAI is negotiating a new private funding round that could value the company at as much as $1.5 trillion, according to Fortune, which reported that investors first approached the company with a $1.2 trillion proposal before OpenAI pushed for the higher number. Forbes reported the same negotiation, citing OpenAI's argument that increased customer traction on its Codex coding tool and the recent launches of GPT-6 Astra and GPT-5.6 Sol justify the premium over what investors initially floated.
From $730 Billion To $1.5 Trillion In Six Months
The number is a striking jump even by OpenAI's own recent standards. The company raised a record $122 billion round in March at a $730 billion valuation -- a figure that was itself the largest private funding round on record at the time.
“## From $730 Billion To $1.5 Trillion In Six Months The number is a striking jump even by OpenAI's own recent standards.”
OpenAI has now raised more than $180 billion since its 2015 founding. The company told Fortune it generated more than $40 billion in annualized revenue last month, roughly double where it stood at the end of 2025, which is the growth OpenAI is using to argue the new mark is earned rather than momentum-driven.
Sam Altman has been explicit about why this is happening through a private round rather than a public listing. He told Fortune that, given the current climate around AI safety, right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public, and that OpenAI does not feel pressure to do so -- a notable reversal in tone from earlier this year, when OpenAI had confidentially filed IPO paperwork. Company statements elsewhere put the earliest realistic IPO window at 2027, a full year later than some bankers had been modeling.
The Competitive Read
OpenAI's private-round strategy contrasts directly with rival Anthropic, previously covered by Pulse, which is preparing to list this fall and could raise more than $100 billion at a valuation north of $2 trillion. The two labs are effectively racing toward similar trillion-dollar-plus outcomes through opposite mechanisms -- OpenAI staying private and using mega-rounds to keep pace with public-market-scale capital needs, Anthropic betting a public listing gets there faster with more durable liquidity for employees and early backers.
The number invites real skepticism. A valuation resting substantially on projected, not contracted, revenue growth is a bet on continued compute-cost declines and continued enterprise adoption of Codex and successor models holding at the current pace -- neither is guaranteed, and OpenAI's leap from $730 billion to a proposed $1.5 trillion in roughly six months is a pace no public software company has matched at this scale. Critics of frontier-lab valuations more broadly have pointed to the gap between announced compute commitments and deployed, revenue-generating capacity as the thing likely to get tested first if growth decelerates even modestly.
What is concrete: no term sheet has been signed, and Fortune's own reporting frames this as a negotiation, not a closed round -- the final number, and which investors participate, remains unresolved.