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UAE investors are in talks to lead a fresh round of funding for OpenAI worth up to USD 30 bn alongside US investment firm Coatue, CNBC reports. The ChatGPT maker is said to be seeking a USD 1.25 tn valuation pre-money (financespeak for “before the new cash comes in”).
The competition for capital is going to be intense: Anthropic filed the S-1 for its blockbuster IPO yesterday and Meta is looking to raise c. USD 95 bn through a rolling series of stock offerings (see story, above).
OpenAI had initially pitched a valuation of c. USD 1.4 tn, but some investors balked, the Financial Times writes. The lower target would still comfortably blow past the company’s USD 852 bn valuation from March of this year.
BACKGROUND: MGX, backed by Mubadala and G42, co-led OpenAI’s USD 122 bn March round and is discussing another investment, as we noted last week. The firm also backs Anthropic.
Compute might also be on the table. OpenAI is looking for a deal on additional computing capacity in the UAE, CNBC says. Abu Dhabi officials would welcome it: The UAE’s broader play is to own pieces of major global AI labs, help build the infrastructure they need, and make certain that plenty of what they hope is future economic upside winds up captured at home.
IN CONTEXT- OpenAI seems to be getting its mojo back. September data from Ramp, a US provider of tech that allows businesses to manage spending on everything from AI to credit cards, show OpenAI adoption last month outpaced both Anthropic and the wider rate of AI adoption in general.
OpenAI has been on a tear of late. It has rolled out dots — AI agents that keep working between conversations — and Pages and Slides for collaborative work, with an Excel-like product in the works. Developers have gotten faster Codex options, expanded cloud coding, and security scanning, plus 28 days of new features or usage resets announced on X to win them over from Claude. The pitch, to tech nerds and knowledge workers alike: spend more of your working day inside OpenAI.