- OpenAI is reportedly considering delaying its IPO until 2027, choosing to wait for a $1 trillion valuation rather than list at a lower price in today’s volatile markets.
- CEO Sam Altman reportedly rejected the option of an earlier listing at a reduced valuation, signalling that the company believes its biggest value lies ahead.
- SoftBank, which expects to hold roughly $65 billion in OpenAI by October, saw its shares fall as much as 13% on the news, the sharpest single-day drop in more than three months.
Most companies go public because they need capital.OpenAI doesn’t, and that changes everything about how you read this story.
According to a New York Times report, the maker of ChatGPT is weighing a delay to its long-anticipated stock market listing, pushing the timeline to 2027 rather than accepting a valuation below $1 trillion in today’s market. When advisers presented CEO Sam Altman with two options, to list sooner at a lower price or wait, he reportedly had little interest in the first.
Why $1 trillion is a benchmark
OpenAI had already filed confidentially for a US IPO, with internal targets indicating a valuation of up to $1 trillion. At that figure, it wouldn’t be competing with other AI companies for investor attention. It would be listed alongside Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, and Alphabet as one of the most valuable technology companies in history.
That’s the company Altman is building toward, and the business OpenAI takes public in 2027 could look fundamentally different from the one investors would buy today.
Founded in 2015 as a nonprofit research lab by Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba and John Schulman, OpenAI has since expanded across enterprise AI, developer tools, infrastructure, and consumer products. It has also become something few Silicon Valley companies ever become: a matter of national security.
Reuters reported that the Trump administration asked OpenAI to stagger the release of GPT-5.6 over security concerns, with access during the preview phase approved on a customer-by-customer basis. A company operating at the intersection of geopolitics, infrastructure, and artificial intelligence has little incentive to rush onto a stock exchange.
The investor with the most to lose
The reported delay has already moved markets — and one company is feeling it more than any other.
SoftBank, one of OpenAI’s largest backers, expects to hold roughly $65 billion worth of the company by October. Investors had increasingly treated that stake as the crown jewel inside SoftBank’s portfolio, helping lift the Japanese investment group’s market value above Toyota earlier this year.
When reports of the delay emerged, SoftBank shares fell as much as 13%, its sharpest intraday drop in more than three months. The reaction underlines what a public listing would have meant: not just a liquidity event, but a transparent, verifiable valuation for one of the most closely watched assets in global finance.
That transparency is now further away than many expected.
The question public markets can’t yet answer
OpenAI is delaying the IPO because it believes public markets aren’t yet equipped to value what it is becoming.
The AI sector is advancing so quickly that a company’s investment case in 2025 may look very different by late 2027. New foundation models, expanding enterprise contracts, and deepening geopolitical relevance could all reshape the story, in either direction.
That is the bet Altman is making. Not that OpenAI is worth $1 trillion today, but by the time it lists, the argument will be impossible to dispute.
Whether public markets agree and when remain the most consequential open questions in technology finance.
