OpenAI closes funding round at an $852B valuation

$2b/month which is $24b/year. Not as much as I expected considering they were at $20b by end of 2025.[0] They only added $4b since?

Anthropic had $19b by end of February 2026 and they added $6b in February alone.[1] This means if they added another $6b in March, they're higher than OpenAI already.

However, I heard that OpenAI and Anthropic report revenue in a different way. OpenAI takes 20% of revenue from Azure sales and reports revenue on that 20%. Anthropic reports all revenue, including AWS's share.[2]

[0]https://www.reuters.com/business/openai-cfo-says-annualized-...

[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news/anthropic-arr-surges-19-billi...

[2]https://x.com/EthanChoi7/status/2036638459868385394

This announcement completes the betrayal of their founding principles.

"Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return."

  - Not advancing digital intelligence
  - While locking people into a superapp
  - Because they are further constrained to generating financial returns

> Today, we closed our latest funding round with $122 billion in committed capital at a post money valuation of $852 billion.

A couple things that stand out to me about this is the use of the phrase "committed capital", which only sounds like a promise that could break from various circumstances, and the valuation of their funding keeps changing so it sounds like a max rather than the valuation every investor invested at.

LLMs are definitely a game changing technology, but there is just so much fake money in the market right now (circular deals, paper valuations, etc.) that I cannot take this seriously. At some point the musical chairs will stop and we will all be saying how could we let this happen? Where are the regulators (rhetorical question)?

> The broad consumer reach of ChatGPT creates a powerful distribution channel into the workplace

They mention this line in different forms a couple of times in the article. It’s clear they’re pretty rattled about Anthropic’s momentum in enterprise, I wonder how confident they really are in this rationale.

The title is incorrect. The $122B includes previous promises. They raised an additional $12B of promises:

"The round totaled $122 billion of committed capital, up from the $110 billion figure that the company announced in February. SoftBank co-led the round alongside other investors, including Andreessen Horowitz and D. E. Shaw Ventures, OpenAI said."

This IPO, if anyone underwrites it, is going to fleece retail so hard. Better make it a SPAC with the help of Chamath and Cantor & Fitzgerald.

No, they didn't raise $122B as the HN title implies. A big chunk of that $122B is a "maybe" that depends on various things that need to happen in the future.

Oh, man... I can't wait to see where this is going. Might not be pretty after all.

> This is not just product simplification. It is a distribution and deployment strategy.

iykyk

Funny how quickly they have become like every other tech company. There is basically no hint of OpenAI the non-profit anymore.

Edit: Why did this go from their press release to a news story?

I lost track when business analysts stopped analysing CEO-level commitments and outputs and performance. right now, it seems that whatever promise is taken as certain and company puffery (using the language invented by themselves) is taken lightly to tricky investor in throwing money.

the whole thing did not yet crash because it seems they can still promise even more without actually delivering definite results

I'm old enough to remember when companies worth $1 billion were called "unicorns." Now we have a company raising 122 times that? Valued at nearly 1000 times that...?

At least they're throwing consumers a bone via the ARK deal. It's crazy how little AI exposure is available to anyone who isn't already wealthy and/or connected.

This has to be just an extension of their previous raise, right? This was a month ago: https://openai.com/index/scaling-ai-for-everyone/

I can't help but think building an "everything" app is so.. both unbelievably ambitious, and a folly. I am not personally convinced that people want all the things that this super app purports to do.

I am from a generation that still sits behind a desktop computer when making "big purchases." I can't even buy a flight on my phone. I am so much less likely to want to have an AI agent do that for me.

Then the idea that daily consumption of these products will drive people to use them more at work... I have a very different life outside of work. My use of AI outside of work is exceedingly different to what I use it for at work.

I sometimes feel wildly out of touch. But sometimes I view this as the VR moment. To me there are some things that I think may always be preferable to do outside of that ecosystem. And for me, a lot of tasks that 'agents' enable are small enough or important enough that I want to do them myself.

I don't think I'll ever be comfortable allowing an agent to call me a taxi, or order food on my behalf. Because the convenience of asking for food isn't worth the chance it'll mess up, and opening an app and looking at a menu is simpler.

I also think we're coming to a moment where we can start identifying the markers of AI generated content on sight. And I think there's a growing animosity to it. I might be comfortable asking AI something, but when I am looking for or searching for other content, seeing AI content markers make me angry at this point.

To finish, I do just sort of straight up hate the idea that we're comparing this moment to the invention of electricity. It's on the face of it absurd.

I get the appetite for frontier models. But why not just invest in Google. Do they really expect the return profile of OpenAI to be vastly different than Google’s Gemini?

Ugh, does this mean I should say goodbye to what little RAM and other hardware remains available on the consumer market?

With $122B what are you going to build next? Spaceships?

This all smells fishy. They didn’t “raise” $122B. Raise means someone put funds in your bank account and said send us the next quarterly report to tell us how our investment is doing.

They have pieces from paper of folks saying they may put up funds or goods and services in that amount. But it’s important to remember that:

1. While they are “raising” commitments others are backing out of deals (see Disney, various data center things). Big deals announced to major fanfare are falling through.

2. They slashed capital expenditure for the future after previously boasting about all the commitments. This is turning into bonkers math of X + Y - X + Z + W - 1/2 of Y = ? On trying to keep track of what’s actually “raised / real” vs what was PR puffery that folks ran away from later.

3. Circular financing still seems to be going on. Big difference of here’s cash, have fun and various “commitments” and balance sheet games that seem to still be going on.

Net net this all still looks very scary and iffy at best.

I hate to read this line when academics and graduate students who work in basic and hard sciences have their funding cut. The grand funding that pays minimum wage to grad students is a burden for this society, yet for a company that took all the valuable data from sources that never got credit, raises billions of dollars. Open says the name, but closed it is by operation. Sorry for this rant, but the priorities of this world suck.

Are there any Polymarket / Kalshi bets on the over-under for the price? I wonder when the music will stop.

I can understand why Amazon, MS and Nvidia invested - nefarious circular deals, but Softbank? I mean who the heck is giving Masayoshi Son money to invest? Behooves me!

The only thing that's really accelerating is how fast you get rate-limited on ChatGPT.

I still don't get how a non profit can become a for profit entity on a whim.

Amazing. Reporting two mercurial numbers as if they were cornerstones.

Intuitively, it just doesn’t feel like OpenAI has a trillion dollar moat.

This leak and looking into source code gave me an impulse to try OpenCode with codex models. I am very impressed with how well it works, and the UI is beautiful.

Fortunately, OpenAI's naming didn't cause a wave of greedy and predatory new companies, like OpenHealth, OpenEnergy, OpenCompute. The non-sexy name of their product using the originating algorithm (GPT) is punishing them. It could be anything else more attractive that would bring more customers. Because, for me, a good, inspiratory, engaging name is half the success.

Microsoft will buy OpenAI for $500B, rebrand it as Microsoft AI.

What if all the people currently using these "AI" services are the entire market for those services? I'm pretty sure everyone that wants to use LLMs is already doing so and already paying for the service.

That would mean the only way to increase growth would be to charge more per token and to get the existing people to use more tokens. Both of which seem to be only what mature companies do when trying to squeeze the cash cow for all it's worth.

It also explains why they're trying to stuff AI into everything, to keep the numbers up, and to get everyone to try and pay them money.

feels like an insult to readers to try to pretend that their revenue per month is comparable to google or apples growth when the funding is absurdly different, not to mention inflation itself.

I am very much onboard with AI within my workflow. I just don't really see a future where openai/anthropic are the absolute front runners for devs though. Maybe OpenAI does just have the better vision by targeting the general public instead, and just competing to become the next google before google can just stay google?

What is their next step to ensure local models never overtake them? If i could use opus 4.6 as a local model isntead and wrap it in someone else's cli tool, i 100% do it today. are the future model's gonna be so far beyond in capability that this sounds foolish? the top models are more than enough to keep up with my own features before i can think of more... so how do they stretch further than that?

A side note i keep thinking about, how impossible is a world where open source base models are collectively trained similar to a proof of work style pool, and then smaller companies simply spin off their own finishing touches or whatever based on that base model? am i thinking of thinks too simplistically? is this not a possibility?

I do not understand how these companies can have such high valuations when minimax m2.7 is going to be open weight.

Pardon my ignorance, but how can a company that spends almost $2 for every $1 it brings in be worth anything?

Looking forward to the movie about this absolute scammer Sam Altman when this is all said and done.

Would be nice to have this seperated from, i-owe-you, vs actual funding that's liquid!

Each passing day the lie that markets efficiently allocate capital is further exposed

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The only way they can manage this type of monetization is a lot of compute to process outputs.

I thought they needed $7 trillion or they'd be unable to keep training new models?

isn't it weird that there is no attribution to a human here? i mean, eventually, they have to dropkick sama and install GPT itself as king, right? EOQ seems as good a time as any

Does anyone know if this, like the spacex/xAI stock — will list on nasdaq? And will it be part of every market cap weighted index fund like VOO(S&P) etc or just for nasdax-100 etfs?

The exchanges are bending head over heels to accommodate these IPOs[1] and make our retirement index funds the exit-liquidity strategy to the thievery of pump and dump actors that buy it low and then sell high? As i understand the way thievery works is:

1. List at many multiples of market valuation on an exchange. So if you company is just 10 billion$ nasdaq and theives collude and say "can make it 100 billion..".

2. Lots of institutional investors and rich billionaires get stock options.

3. All market weighted index funds — aka all *your* low expense ratio ETF money — have to re-balance and buy them, raising their value: the exit-liquidity event

4. Rich A**** get richer by making an profit by selling higher.

[1] https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/03/31/index-providers...

Almost a trillion for a company that hasn’t proved it can reach any form of profitability, all on the promise of an elusive messianic concept of machine superintelligence through probabilistic algorithms. Basically like praying cancer away. Peak magical thinking, peak America.

With $122 billion at your disposal, what do you plan to build next—spaceships?

No mention of "AGI" this time. Since we all knew it was a scam. But this is the most damning of them all:

> The OpenAI flywheel is simple. More compute drives more intelligent models. More intelligent models drive better products. Better products drive faster adoption, more revenue and more cashflow.

FTX had a "flywheel". It fell off. Being saddled with hundreds of billions of debt makes this situation ten times worse.

Are we going to see a trillion dollar IPO?

There is a lot of talk about the AI bubble. I think there are comparisons to the late 90's/early 00's here with early stars rising quickly but, ultimately, falling. Since essentially everything touches the internet now it is clear that the 'internet bubble' was more of a shakeup of companies than a real over-hype of the internet. That, I think, is at play right now too with the 'AI bubble'. AI isn't going away but some of the early stars may not make it.

So, the real question here is: Is OpenAI Netscape, or are they Google?

Feels like the number is more about FOMO than fundamentals at this point.

Google is totally going to run this company out of money aren't they?

You do know that not all of these AI companies can become be trillion dollar companies, right? Easy come, easy go has no limit.

$852B and we still don't have an IAM layer for AI agents.

They are trying very hard to convince themselves that it's going to work, when we see all the models plateauing... it's clearly hitting the ceiling