OpenAI reportedly raises an additional $11 billion at a $1.25 trillion valuation

A source told Bloomberg the full round could reach roughly $20 billion when it wraps. That would still leave OpenAI well short of what it was shopping earlier in the fall — in late September, Bloomberg reported the company was seeking $30 billion in the round. The current figures fall meaningfully below that target, a sign that investor appetite, while large, is not unlimited at trillion-dollar-plus prices.

TechCrunch has reached out to OpenAI for comment and said it will update the story if the company responds.

The raise lands against a complicated backdrop for AI market pricing. Hours before the funding report, Bloomberg also reported that potential buyers of shares in Anthropic's IPO are weighing a valuation substantially below what the company had targeted — as low as $1.1 trillion, versus the $2 trillion investors were said to be expecting roughly a month ago. In other words, both of the leading frontier labs are seeing their headline numbers trimmed by the market.

OpenAI itself had previously intimated it would go public this year, then delayed those plans; expectations now center on an IPO at some point next year. The company's fundraising path between now and then will effectively set the reference point for that listing.

Macro and political conditions are complicating the picture further. The Democratic landslide in the U.S. midterms, paired with overwhelmingly negative voter sentiment toward data centers, has injected jitters across the market, with many participants anticipating regulatory challenges ahead. OpenAI's ability to close the remaining roughly $9 billion of its round — and at what final valuation — will be an early read on how much of that anxiety has priced into private AI deals.

What to watch: whether the round closes near $20 billion or drifts lower, whether OpenAI revises its IPO timeline again, and whether Anthropic's eventual pricing lands closer to $1.1 trillion or $2 trillion. Together, those three data points will define the ceiling for AI valuations heading into next year.