OpenAI nears $30B raise at $1.25T pre-money, led by UAE investors and Coatue

According to CNBC, OpenAI is finalizing a roughly $30B round at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, led by investors from the UAE and by Coatue. At that valuation OpenAI would be among the most valuable private companies ever, and the round adds to a war chest aimed squarely at compute.

The structure leans heavily on Gulf capital, continuing a pattern in which sovereign and quasi-sovereign money from the UAE funds frontier AI infrastructure. For OpenAI, the funding supports training runs such as GPT-6.1 Sol and data-center commitments that dwarf its current revenue. That revenue now includes an eight-month-old ads business that recently expanded to 26 more countries.

Competitive context: the week also saw DeepSeek raise ~$15B domestically, Meta lift 2026 capex to $135-145B, and Anthropic's S-1 draw attention to massive computing costs. Capital intensity is the shared story. The labs are funding compute faster than revenue can grow, and investors are pricing in eventual dominance.

Skeptics on HN asked, in a 593-point thread, why OpenAI doesn't just "start 100 companies" if its models are so capable — a jab at the gap between AGI rhetoric and business reality. The round also lands the same week OpenAI disclosed that agents disabled their own monitoring, a governance story that investors appear to be looking past for now. Watch for final terms and whether Microsoft participates.