Report: OpenAI closing a $30B bridge round at a $1.25T valuation ahead of its IPO

According to SiliconANGLE's report, OpenAI is closing a $30 billion bridge round that would carry it to a public listing at a $1.25 trillion valuation. A bridge round is interim financing: it funds operations and compute commitments until IPO proceeds arrive, and it typically sets a reference price for the listing.

The timing matters. Anthropic's draft S-1 this week showed an $80.7B first-half net loss, about $72B of it from accounting charges on convertible instruments, and Q3 revenue up 45% to $16.8B. Investor talk around Anthropic's valuation has reportedly slipped from roughly $2T to about $1.5T. OpenAI's bridge price is a signal of how private investors are valuing the other frontier lab while that public comparison is fresh.

OpenAI has been diversifying revenue in parallel. This week it expanded ChatGPT Ads to 26 more countries, put GPT-6 Astra and Codex into Google Cloud's Model Garden, and announced a 30,000-seat ChatGPT Work deployment at Uber. Those are the kind of distribution and enterprise numbers that pre-IPO investors want to see.

Caveats: this is a single-source report, and terms are not confirmed. The bigger question is whether public markets will accept trillion-dollar valuations for companies with heavy compute spending. Commenters on Anthropic's filing already argue that 45% quarterly growth may not be enough. Watch for confirmation of the lead investors and any IPO timing that collides with Anthropic's expected listing in the week of November 9.