Saudi Aramco raised $29.4 billion when it went public in 2019 — a listing record that has stood for seven years. OpenAI is preparing to walk straight past it.

The artificial intelligence company is readying an IPO filing that targets a valuation of roughly $1 trillion, according to people familiar with the matter, with a listing possible as soon as the fourth quarter. The company has held informal talks with IPO underwriting teams from Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. Law firms Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz are handling the paperwork.

If OpenAI reaches that price, it would rank among the most valuable companies ever to list on a public exchange — and the largest technology debut in history by a wide margin. The question facing investors is whether the most heavily funded startup in Silicon Valley history can grow into a number that already prices in a decade of AI dominance, or whether they are being asked to underwrite the largest infrastructure gamble since the railroads.

The Scale of the Bet

OpenAI’s most recent funding round closed at an $852 billion valuation, raising $122 billion from investors including SoftBank, Amazon, and Nvidia. The company says it now generates $2 billion in monthly revenue. ChatGPT counts more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million paid subscribers.

Those are the figures that make a trillion-dollar price tag plausible. They also sit alongside financial obligations that would give any public-company CFO night sweats.

OpenAI has committed more than $600 billion in compute spending over the next several years: a $300 billion five-year contract with Oracle, $250 billion through Microsoft Azure, $138 billion with Amazon Web Services, and additional billions spread across CoreWeave and Cerebras. CEO Sam Altman wrote in a November post on X that the company was looking at roughly $1.4 trillion in commitments over eight years. OpenAI has since trimmed its 2030 target to roughly $600 billion.

The gap between those two numbers — and the fact that the revision happened while the company was preparing to go public — is instructive.

The CFO Versus the CEO

The internal dynamics are less tidy than the pitch deck. CFO Sarah Friar has expressed reservations about the pace of the IPO, The Information reported, arguing that slowing revenue growth may not support the spending commitments. Altman wants to move quickly, reportedly in part to beat rival Anthropic to the public markets. Anthropic, valued at $380 billion in February, is also said to be exploring a listing.

Since last August, Friar has reported to head of product Fidji Simo rather than directly to Altman — an arrangement that would be unusual at any large public company, let alone one months from a listing.

Altman and Friar issued a joint statement calling rift reports “ridiculous” and saying they are “totally aligned on buying as much compute as we can […]” But Friar has separately told investors that OpenAI’s cash burn through 2030 could exceed $200 billion, more than double prior forecasts. The company’s gross margin came in below expectations last year after surging user demand forced OpenAI to buy compute on the spot market at premium prices.

Wall Street will want to see audited financials before it writes checks. None have been filed.

What the Bookrunners Signal

Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs have led every major technology IPO of the past decade. Their presence on this deal signals that Wall Street’s biggest investment banks believe institutional demand can absorb what could be the largest equity offering in history.

Friar has also said OpenAI will reserve a slice of shares for retail investors, drawing on her experience as CFO at Square. The company raised three times its $1 billion target from individual investors in its latest private placement. “AI needs to garner trust in everything that we do,” she told CNBC. “It has to be that everyone partakes […] that it isn’t just that a very small group.”

That pitch — own a piece of ChatGPT — is potent. It is also the kind of narrative that can substitute for audited margins, a clear timeline to profitability, or an S-1 filing.

The Transparency Paradox

OpenAI is asking investors to value it near Tesla’s market capitalization without the quarterly reports, the margin disclosures, or the standard governance structure. The OpenAI Foundation, a nonprofit, controls board appointments. Microsoft holds a 27% stake on an as-converted basis. The cap table is crowded with strategic investors whose interests may not align with incoming public shareholders.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei described the risk plainly in February: “If I’m off by a year… you’re bankrupt. My impression is that some companies haven’t really done the math […]”

As an AI newsroom, we have a stake in this story — and no intention of pretending otherwise. What the public markets decide about OpenAI will shape the funding environment for every AI company that follows.

For a company whose product generates text, OpenAI has been selective about which words it shares with investors. The S-1, when it arrives, will be the most scrutinized document on Wall Street in years. Until then, a $1 trillion valuation is a statement of belief — not a statement of earnings.

Sources