The price rises as the listing recedes

The usual order is that a company raises private money until it is large enough to list, and then lists. OpenAI is being offered the private money precisely because it is not listing.

The company is in early talks over a funding round that would value it at more than $1.2tn, the Financial Times reported on Tuesday, as relayed by PYMNTS. One person familiar with the matter said the talks were initiated by investors rather than by OpenAI, and that whether they proceed depends on when the company chooses to go public. OpenAI declined to comment.

The figure is about 41% above the last one. OpenAI raised $122bn at an $852bn valuation in March and filed confidentially for an initial public offering in June, which left open the possibility of a listing this year.

That timetable has moved. Sam Altman said on Saturday that the offering is unlikely to happen before 2027, and has described the present as an "ill-advised moment" to go public amid growing concern about the risks the technology presents.

The reason given matters as much as the delay. Altman was among the executives who publicly backed slowing the pace of frontier development last week, a proposal Washington and Beijing each rejected within two days. A listing would put the company's own statements about risk into a prospectus, where they become disclosures with legal weight rather than positions in a debate.

Seen from the investors' side, the approach is straightforward. A company that has filed and then paused is a company with an audited story and no public price, and a late private round is the last chance to buy before that price is set by a market that may pay more.

The revenue gives them something to point at. Annualised revenue passed $40bn in August, according to the report, after a 20% rise that followed the release of GPT-5.6 in July. At $1.2tn that is a multiple of about thirty times, high by any public-market standard and not obviously high for a company still growing at that rate.

What the round would really buy OpenAI is time. Private capital on this scale lets the company keep spending on compute and chips, including the supply arrangements it has been deepening with Samsung, without an equity market setting its cost of capital each quarter.

There is a tension in that, and it is not a small one. A company arguing that the frontier should move more slowly is at the same time raising enough money to move it faster than almost anyone else, and delaying the one step that would require it to explain that combination to public shareholders.

None of this is agreed. The talks are early, the size of the round has not been reported, and the person who described them made the whole thing conditional on a listing date that the company has not set. The number that has been fixed is the one investors opened with, and they opened above a trillion.