OpenAI IPO Eyes $1 Trillion Valuation With 900 Million Weekly Users

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is reportedly exploring an initial public offering in late 2026 that could value the company at $1 trillion, a figure that would dwarf most historical tech listings and set a new benchmark for the artificial intelligence industry. The potential offering follows a period of explosive growth, with the company now serving 900 million weekly active users and generating approximately $2 billion in monthly revenue, according to recent reports.

"The growth is largely driven by enterprise adoption and API usage, but regular ChatGPT subscriptions also weigh in on the monthly figure as well," OpenAI said in a statement detailing its financial performance. The company confirmed it closed its latest funding round of $122 billion, backed by major tech players including Microsoft, Amazon, and Nvidia, to build out its extensive data center infrastructure.

The San Francisco-based company's latest private funding round valued it at $852 billion, with investors pouring capital into the AI leader despite its high operational costs. OpenAI has told investors it projects annual revenue to reach $280 billion by 2030, a steep climb from the $13.1 billion in sales last year. The firm's infrastructure demands are massive, with plans to spend $600 billion on total compute resources by 2030, a necessary expenditure to power its models for its massive user base.

A leaked capitalization table reveals the scale of returns for early and late-stage investors. Microsoft stands as the most significant financial winner, with its $13 billion investment now commanding a 26.79% stake worth an estimated $228.3 billion, an 18x return. SoftBank's $64.6 billion commitment gives it an 11.66% stake valued at nearly $100 billion. In a highly unusual governance structure, CEO Sam Altman holds no direct equity in the company he leads.

The Competitive Landscape

OpenAI is not alone in its public market ambitions. Rival Anthropic, developer of the Claude AI model, is reportedly considering an IPO as early as October of this year, seeking to raise $60 billion. While Anthropic's user base is smaller, it has gained traction in the enterprise market and attracted investment from tech giants like Nvidia and Amazon, who are backing multiple horses in the AI race to fuel demand for their own cloud and chip infrastructure.

The intense competition extends to the enormous energy resources required to train and run these large language models. A single prompt to ChatGPT uses an estimated 18.9 watt-hours of electricity, over 60 times more than a conventional Google search. Analysts at BestBrokers estimate OpenAI's annual electricity costs at over $3 billion, a figure that highlights the capital-intensive nature of the AI industry.

What's Next for Investors

For investors, the reconstructed cap table confirms that while early venture firms like Khosla Ventures and Sound Ventures have seen extraordinary multiples of 30x to 43x, the largest dollar-denominated returns are concentrated among large-scale, late-stage investors like Microsoft and SoftBank. The upcoming IPO, whether it arrives in 2026 or 2027, will be the liquidity event that turns these massive paper gains into realized returns and will serve as a major test for public market appetite for AI companies with high growth and equally high burn rates.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.