- OpenAI has confidentially filed for a US IPO and is reportedly targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion, according to reports.
- The ChatGPT maker closed its most recent funding round at $122 billion in committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation in April 2026, and serves more than 900 million weekly active users.
- The listing would follow rival Anthropic’s IPO filing and could become one of the most consequential technology market debuts in a decade.
The race to dominate artificial intelligence is moving from private markets to public ones, and both of the world’s leading AI companies are filing for IPOs within weeks of each other.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC in May 2026. Sam Altman is reportedly targeting a debut at a valuation between $852 billion and $1 trillion, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the deal.
From research lab to AI powerhouse
OpenAI was founded in December 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman, and other researchers. Altman and Musk co-chaired the company in its early years; Musk departed the board in 2018. The company began as a nonprofit before restructuring into a capped-profit company and, in October 2025, into a Public Benefit Corporation under which it will go public.
The company spent years operating in research mode before launching ChatGPT in November 2022. As of March 2026, ChatGPT had surpassed 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million paying subscribers.
Why investors are betting on OpenAI
OpenAI closed its latest funding round in April 2026 with $122 billion in committed capital, the largest private financing in Silicon Valley history, at a post-money valuation of $852 billion. The round was anchored by Amazon, NVIDIA, and SoftBank, with Microsoft, a16z, D.E. Shaw Ventures, MGX, TPG, and funds advised by T. Rowe Price also participating, alongside more than $3 billion raised from individual investors through banking channels.
OpenAI is generating approximately $2 billion in monthly revenue — an annualised rate of around $24 billion, growing at four times the pace of Google and Meta at comparable revenue stages. Despite that, the company remains deeply unprofitable.
Competition
OpenAI may have ignited the generative AI revolution, but competition has intensified on multiple fronts. Its closest rival is Anthropic, which recently confidentially filed for its own IPO after raising $65 billion at a valuation of approximately $965 billion. Claude has gained significant traction among developers and enterprises, particularly for coding and reasoning applications.
DeepSeek, the Chinese AI lab reportedly seeking to raise $3–4 billion at a $50 billion valuation, demonstrated in early 2025 that competitive frontier models could be built at a fraction of US compute costs.
Elon Musk’s xAI has raised approximately $12 billion to accelerate Grok development and integrate its models across the X platform. Google’s Gemini and DeepMind continue to compete across consumer AI, enterprise applications, and frontier model development.
The question for public market investors is not whether AI will transform industries. It is whether a company burning $14 billion a year, with profitability still four years away, deserves a valuation above $1 trillion.
For now, Wall Street appears ready to find out.
