OpenAI seeks up to $100 Billion in funding at a potential $830 billion valuation
The planned raise will test whether investors still believe the AI boom can support OpenAI’s enormous spending.
OpenAI is back at the fundraising table, and this time the numbers are hard to ignore. The company is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion in a new funding round that could value it at $830 billion, according to reports from The Wall Street Journal. If successful, it would mark one of the largest private capital raises in tech history, catapulting OpenAI's valuation from $300 billion in March 2025 to nearly triple that in less than a year.
What's driving this raise is far more revealing than the valuation itself. The short answer? Survival. Training and running advanced AI models takes massive amounts of computing power. We're talking specialized chips, huge data centers and infrastructure, and the costs to keep all this together are just way expensive. OpenAI isn't raising money to get ahead. It's raising money to stay in the game.
Despite expecting $12.7 billion in revenue for 2025, the company expects to lose $14 billion by 2026. Its total losses from 2023 to 2028 could also hit $44 billion, according to reports. This tells OpenAI is burning through billions faster than it can bring them in, and the gap isn't shrinking.
Oluwajeminipe Fasheun-Motesho
For the millions using ChatGPT every day, this raises an uncomfortable question: what happens if OpenAI can't keep this pace? The answer matters more than you might think. OpenAI controls roughly 17% of the AI chatbot market. Its technology powers work tools, coding platforms, and thousands of apps that people and businesses use daily. If money problems force the company to cut back on servers and computing power, you could start seeing slower responses, limited access during busy times, or outages.
Then there's pricing. OpenAI already rolled out ChatGPT Pro at $200 per month. It's looking at exploring advertising as a revenue stream. And as the company struggles to balance its books, users can expect more aggressive monetization. Free users will likely see tighter feature restrictions, while enterprise customers could face steeper pricing for OpenAI to close its revenue gap.
At the same time, OpenAI's deal mechanics highlight a tangled web of dependency. Amazon is reportedly talking about putting around $10 billion into OpenAI, tied to a deal where OpenAI uses Amazon's AI chips. That kind of circular setup shows how tangled the AI business has become. Partners give OpenAI money while also selling it the servers and chips it desperately needs. It works for both sides, sure, but it also means OpenAI depends on these relationships to survive, and that gives those companies real power.
Louis Eriakha
The fundraising is still early. OpenAI hopes to close by the end of March 2026, but people close to the talks say nothing's final. There's no guarantee the company can find enough investors willing to put up that much money. This comes after October's $500 billion valuation, which happened when current and former employees sold about $6.6 billion worth of shares. The jump from $500 billion to possibly $830 billion in just two months shows one thing: investors believe OpenAI will dominate AI long enough to eventually make money instead of losing it.
That's a huge gamble. It means betting that OpenAI can outlast rivals, avoid government crackdowns, and finally figure out how to run a business that actually turns a profit. The pressure is real. OpenAI recently told employees to move faster and push harder to counter growing threats from Alphabet's Google Gemini. The panic inside matches the pressure outside. The company needs to prove its technology lead is worth the mind-blowing amount of money being thrown at it.
For users and businesses already hooked into OpenAI's world, the stakes couldn't be clearer. The company's financial health directly affects the tools millions use daily. Whether that $830 billion valuation sticks will decide not just OpenAI's future, but where the entire AI industry goes next.
Louis Eriakha
