OpenAI is raising funds again: at a $1.2 trillion valuation, who dares to take the next baton?

OpenAI is in preliminary talks with investors about a new round of private fundraising, with a potential valuation of $1.2 trillion or more. With more than $180 billion already raised and existing major shareholders broadly facing capital expenditure pressure, who can anchor this round of financing has become the biggest question. This week, according to The Information, OpenAI is currently in early negotiations with investors over a new round of private fundraising, and the company's valuation in this round could reach $1.2 trillion or higher. Just before news of this funding round emerged, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman publicly said the company will not hold an IPO this year. By remaining private, OpenAI can buy more time to boost sales while avoiding disclosure to public markets of its high growth costs, such as the discounts that severely squeeze margins as it competes with rival Anthropic for business. However, the core difficulty facing this funding round is: who can serve as the ballast for such a massive deal? OpenAI has already obtained or been promised as much as $182 billion in financing, far exceeding Anthropic's $130 billion and setting a record for private company fundraising. But its major existing investors are each facing capital pressure of their own, leaving limited room to write another huge check. Why choose to stay in the private market Sam Altman recently made clear that an IPO will not happen this year. For OpenAI, remaining private provides a key buffer: it does not have to disclose to public shareholders the cost behind its growth. According to analysis by The Information, OpenAI is currently trading price cuts for growth. This strategy helps expand its user base, but does little to help actual cash recovery. Its annualized revenue growth rate in July has exceeded $40 billion, but it still lags behind Anthropic's $65 billion. At the same time, OpenAI previously projected that server rental costs needed for AI model training alone will consume about $170 billion cumulatively by 2028. If this funding round is priced at a $1.2 trillion valuation, and the IPO valuation reaches $1.5 trillion. If this figure is close to outside forecasts for Anthropic's IPO valuation, then early entrants will receive a book return of about 25%. Existing major shareholders each have their own troubles In previous funding rounds, OpenAI has already brought almost all large institutional investors in the market onto its shareholder register. In the $122 billion financing announced in March this year, there were as many as nearly 30 participants, covering asset management giants such as T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, and BlackRock, crossover funds such as Coatue Management, D1 Capital Partners, and Dragoneer Investment Group, as well as top Silicon Valley venture firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. But among these institutions, very few truly have the ability to deploy tens of billions of dollars. And several of the largest current shareholders are precisely the ones facing their own capital pressure: SoftBank has applied for nearly $12 billion in loans to deliver the final $10 billion investment it committed to OpenAI. Amazon expects capital expenditure to reach $200 billion this year in July, likely far exceeding its operating cash flow. Nvidia, meanwhile, is providing up to $105 billion in credit support for OpenAI's large data center in Ohio, already a heavy off-balance-sheet burden. If the above companies were to significantly increase their OpenAI equity stakes again, it would inevitably raise alarm among their respective creditors and shareholders. Can suppliers become the new buyers With existing major shareholders generally constrained, OpenAI's group of chip and computing power suppliers has become a potential source of financing that the outside world is watching. The logic is that if OpenAI's business continues to grow, these suppliers themselves are direct beneficiaries, and investing in exchange for deeper binding has strategic value. Among them, Broadcom, which is cooperating with OpenAI to develop custom chips, held about $24 billion in cash and equivalents as of August this year, making it one of the few potential buyers that still has room to maneuver. However, whether OpenAI's revenue can truly accelerate remains the biggest unknown. Although the company recently launched the Codex coding product and released new models such as 5.6 and Astra, its simultaneous price cuts have cast a shadow over its revenue outlook. What has drawn even more market attention is that researchers within OpenAI have publicly called for slowing the pace of model development to wait for safety practices to catch up. This internal disagreement undoubtedly adds more variables to the company's next move. This article is reprinted from "Wall Street See", author: Bao Yilong; GMTEight editor: Yan Wencai.