OpenAI has secured $11 billion in new funding, the first portion of a financing round that values the company behind ChatGPT at $1.25 trillion, Bloomberg News reported on Friday.
The money has already been wired by investors, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg, and the round is expected to close in the coming weeks. It could eventually total about $20 billion, with roughly $9 billion more still to be raised.
The figures fall well short of what OpenAI set out to achieve. The company initially sought up to $30 billion at a valuation of as much as $1.5 trillion, and investors have since marked down both the size of the round and the price they are willing to pay. The $1.25 trillion valuation is still about 47 per cent above the $852 billion post-money valuation set in OpenAI’s previous round, announced on 31 March 2026, when the company raised $122 billion in committed capital.
Reuters, citing two investors, reported that SoftBank and MGX, the Abu Dhabi state-backed investment vehicle, took part in the first tranche. The Financial Times has reported that a United Arab Emirates consortium including MGX is expected to be the largest participant in the round overall, with Founders Fund, Coatue, Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz also expected to join.
OpenAI has not publicly confirmed the closing, and the full list of participants has not been disclosed. The reports rest on unnamed sources, so the terms should be treated as reported rather than confirmed. There is also some uncertainty over the valuation figure itself: CNBC reported in October that the $1.25 trillion under discussion was a pre-money figure, while neither Bloomberg nor Reuters specified which basis it uses.
The funding lands in a week when enthusiasm for artificial intelligence has cooled sharply on Wall Street. The Nasdaq fell 5 per cent into correction territory on Thursday as investors reassessed the cost of the AI build-out, and data-centre and chip shares have led a broad sell-off. OpenAI’s chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, told CNBC on Friday that the company would maintain its AI infrastructure investment and capital-raising plans despite the turbulence.
The cash will help fund OpenAI’s enormous spending commitments on computing power. The company has struck deals worth hundreds of billions of dollars for chips and data-centre capacity, including partnerships with Oracle, SoftBank and the UAE-backed Stargate project, as it races to keep ChatGPT ahead of rivals from Google, Anthropic and Meta.
Sources: Reuters
