OpenAI nears $30 billion round led by UAE investors

OpenAI is closing in on a funding round of up to $30 billion led by investors from the United Arab Emirates, with investment firm Coatue leading the raise, CNBC reports. The round values the company at $1.25 trillion pre-money and is being positioned as a bridge ahead of a potential IPO — OpenAI confidentially filed a prospectus with the SEC in June.

The timing details tell their own story. CFO Sarah Friar told employees in August that OpenAI would be publicly traded by 2027. CEO Sam Altman said in September that the timing was unfavorable for going public — a message he had already delivered internally in June. A private round at a $1.25 trillion valuation, underwritten by Gulf money, is what a company does when the public market is not yet obliged to price its equity.

The identity of the buyer matters as much as the size. The UAE is simultaneously negotiating a commercial deal to supply OpenAI with additional compute capacity, meaning Abu Dhabi would fund both the capital and the infrastructure. Western markets have started showing strain under the AI buildout: Meta's promised AI contracts approach $82.5 billion, and Goldman Sachs estimates nearly half of this year's S&P 500 earnings growth traces back to AI capital expenditure. Memory-chip makers have retreated more than 50 percent from their peaks, with Samsung and SK Hynix trading at forward earnings multiples of roughly 3–4 times — a valuation that assumes the spending stops.

When listed markets flinch, the round finds a sovereign with no quarterly obligation to flinch. The Gulf states built their model on hydrocarbons and are now financing, at trillion-dollar marks, the technology advertised as their replacement. It is a coherent trade: convert a depleting finite asset into equity in whatever succeeds it. For OpenAI, the arrangement supplies capital and compute without the disclosure regime a listing would impose — and without a shareholder base that could ask why a company losing money on every inference is worth more than most European stock markets combined.

Competitor Anthropic is meanwhile preparing its own IPO, targeting a valuation between $1.5 trillion and $2 trillion. The two rivals have chosen opposite exits from the same problem: Anthropic will let public investors set the price, while OpenAI sells to buyers whose own valuation logic runs through a barrel of oil.

Altman told staff in June the timing was unfavorable. The UAE appears to have disagreed.