OpenAI’s $1 Trillion IPO Could Launch Next Year

An anonymously sourced report from Reuters claims that OpenAI is planning an initial public offering that would value the AI colossus at “up to $1 trillion.” Just on Tuesday, the company formally completed its slow evolution from an ambiguous non-profit to a for-profit company. Now it appears to be formalizing plans to become one of the world’s centers of economic power—at least on paper.

The $1 trillion report comes from “three people familiar with the matter.” Reuters’ sources claimed that OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has been telling OpenAI “associates” that an IPO is coming in 2027, but that actually it could come in late 2026.

Judging by the current ranking of companies by market capitalization, a $1 trillion valuation would make OpenAI the 12th most valuable publicly traded firm on Earth, just below Berkshire Hathaway, and just above JPMorgan Chase and Walmart.

A publicly traded OpenAI would make for a fascinating case study, since shareholders really do expect companies to bring in money instead of just spending it—something OpenAI has notoriously had a hard time doing so far. As Elon Musk once put it, “There’s immense pressure on a public company to not have a bad quarter.”

Becoming public can force a lot of information about a company’s real value into public view—quarterly and annual reports on finances most famously, but also everything about the company’s history that goes in an IPO prospectus. Institutional investors buy shares based on that prospectus, and when the company does go public, its merits can be judged harshly by Wall Street traders, as happened with Uber when it went public in 2019, and its stock price immediately plunged. Companies can also sense which way the wind is blowing if things aren’t going well, and withdraw an IPO before the company gets humiliated, as happened with Ari Emmanuel’s talent agency Endeavor Group in the same year as Uber’s humiliating debut.

In a livestream on Tuesday, Sam Altman made similarly grandiose claims about 13-figure sums of money. According to Axios, he said eventually he’d like to build one gigawatt’s worth of new data center capacity per week, which he expects to cost $20 billion per gigawatt. Add it up yourself, and that’s over $1 trillion per year. “Eventually we need to get to hundreds of billions a year in revenue, and we’re on a pretty steep curve towards that,” he claimed.

He also added (again, per Axios) that going public “is the most likely path for us given the capital needs that we’ll have and, sort of, the size of the company.”