OpenAI said on Monday that it has confidentially filed for a draft for IPO. The company is expected to go public as early as Q4FY26 with a valuation that could be close to a trillion dollars. The AI giant has submitted its S-1 form for review and is keeping the sensitive financial books private before they are made public to the prospective investors.
“We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak, so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs, and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best,” read OpenAI's blog post.
The company has a private valuation of somewhat close to $850 billion. CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC in April that it’s “good hygiene” for a company like OpenAI to look, feel and act like a “public company”. However, she did not mention a specific timeline for the IPO. The company is currently working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on the filing.
Open AI Financial reality
OpenAI was last valued privately at $852 billion; going public would shed light on the real financial margin and expose the company to intense scrutiny. It flagship LLM (large language model) ChatGPT now supports more than 900 million active users weekly. OpenAI has raised around $180 billion in private VC funding. It is burning staggering computing and operational infrastructure costs exceeding $100 billion annually. Internal communication from the company, reported by the Wall Street Journal, states that it is not expected to be profitable before 2030. It plans to spend roughly $600 billion on computing and data centres by 2030, as reported by CNBC and Reuters.
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Race to Wall Street
OpenAI marks the third AI giant which is racing to become public. Its primary rival, Anthropic, maker of Claude, has beaten them to the market with a confidential filing, at a private valuation of roughly $965 billion. Elon Musk's rocket maker SpaceX is leading the pack with its record-breaking $1.77 trillion valuation. SpaceX stock trading is scheduled to officially start on Friday, June 12, 2026, and is expected to raise around $75 billion.

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