OpenAI Wants To Go Public, But AI Economics May Face A Reality Check

OpenAI is preparing to go public, and it could be one of the largest stock market debuts in history, CNBC reported. The company behind ChatGPT has not formally announced an initial public offering (IPO), but multiple reports suggest preparations are underway for a confidential filing in the United States. 

Reuters reported that the company could file in the coming weeks and aim for a listing as early as September 2026.

If the IPO happens, investors will not just be buying into an AI chatbot company. They will be buying into a business that sits at the centre of the global artificial intelligence race, burns billions of dollars annually on computing infrastructure and carries one of the highest private valuations ever recorded.

How ChatGPT-Maker Is Structured

An IPO would require OpenAI to complete one of the most unusual corporate transitions in Silicon Valley.

OpenAI started out in December 2015 as a nonprofit research lab. Its founders included Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, John Schulman and Elon Musk, who together pledged $1 billion to get it off the ground. The idea was to build artificial intelligence that benefits humanity, not shareholders.

But by 2019, the company needed more money than a nonprofit could raise. So it created a for-profit arm, OpenAI LP, while keeping the original nonprofit, OpenAI Inc., in charge as the parent body. To make sure investors did not have too much say, the company capped their returns at 100 times their investment. 

Anything beyond that would go back to the nonprofit's mission. The nonprofit is now the OpenAI Foundation, while the for-profit is now a public benefit corporation, called OpenAI Group PBC. The nonprofit still holds roughly 26% equity in OpenAI's public benefit corporation structure.

That governance model has become a central issue as the company moves closer to public markets. Elon Musk's $150 billion lawsuit challenging OpenAI's shift toward a for-profit structure had created a major legal overhang before being dismissed recently.

The dismissal appears to have accelerated IPO discussions, reports said.

Reuters described the company’s governance structure as an additional concern for investors evaluating a potential listing.

How Did OpenAI Become Worth Billions 

OpenAI’s valuation has climbed at a pace rarely seen in technology markets. In October 2025, secondary share sales valued the company at nearly $500 billion, as per reports.

By April 2026, the company completed a $122 billion funding round that pushed its valuation to $852 billion. Amazon committed to invest $50 billion, while Nvidia and SoftBank committed $30 billion each.

Reuters separately reported that OpenAI’s latest financing round may have become Silicon Valley’s largest-ever private funding round.

The numbers around the business are also expanding quickly. In a blog post, OpenAI said it is generating nearly $2 billion in monthly revenue. The tech giant, as quoted by Bloomberg, projected that its revenue will exceed $280 billion in 2030.  

And much of its projected growth comes from expanding subscriptions to its AI products among consumers and enterprises. The company is also exploring advertising as a fresh monetisation avenue by testing ads with certain users. It has set internal targets for ad revenue. 

The Sam Altman-led AI platform expects to generate $2.5 billion in advertising revenue this year, with projections to reach $100 billion by 2030, Axios reported, cited by Reuters.

In a presentation to investors, the company has broken down the projections. It expects ad revenue to surge to $11 billion in 2027, $25 billion in 2028 ​and $53 billion by 2029, based on the assumption ​that OpenAI's products will reach 2.75 billion weekly users ⁠by 2030, the report added.

But the revenue growth comes with equally massive spending. OpenAI could burn nearly $25 billion this year alone, according to The Information. The company is also expected to spend $121 billion on computing infrastructure by 2028. Even after projected revenue growth, OpenAI reportedly expects to burn $85 billion in 2028.

Why OpenAI’s Listing Matters

A recent Deutsche Bank report described OpenAI’s proposed stock market debut as a landmark moment for the artificial intelligence industry. The institutional report called it a rare opportunity for investors to gain direct exposure to a “pure-play AI company”. 

Unlike firms such as Microsoft, Amazon or Nvidia, which benefit from AI through cloud services, chips or software products, OpenAI is viewed as a company whose core business revolves entirely around advanced AI models and applications. 

Investor interest in AI has surged since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022. The report noted that shares of the “Magnificent Seven” technology companies have quadrupled during this period as markets increasingly bet on AI-led growth. 

However, retail investors currently have to pick companies with AI offerings in other parts of the supply chain, either in infrastructure, such as semiconductor makers or cloud providers, or applications that sit on top of the foundation models. 

Most public market exposure to AI still comes through semiconductor makers, cloud providers or software companies integrating AI tools into existing services. 

Reports have suggested it could be planning to raise $60bn in an IPO that would value it at more than $1trillion. That would be the biggest IPO ever, twice as big as Saudi Aramco’s IPO, which was valued at $25.6 billion in 2019, assuming no one else gets there first.

What Could Worry Investors

Microsoft’s relationship with OpenAI is expected to remain a key focus area if the company moves ahead with an IPO. The tech giant has invested billions into OpenAI and remains its closest strategic partner through cloud infrastructure and product integrations.

However, an earlier report by CNBC said that OpenAI had warned investors about its dependence on Microsoft in financial documents shared during its latest fundraising round in March this year.

According to the report, OpenAI said Microsoft accounts for “a substantial portion of our financing and compute”. The documents reportedly included sections titled “Risks Related to the Transaction” and “Risks Related to our Business”.

An IPO could potentially clarify several issues that remain opaque in private markets, including revenue-sharing agreements, governance rights and the economics of OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft.

OpenAI has been preparing the groundwork for an IPO in recent months, streamlining its offering, focusing more on paying enterprise customers and clarifying its partnership with Microsoft. It is now working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on draft IPO paperwork. 

Earlier this week, it won a long-running legal case brought by Elon Musk. 

What Makes OpenAI IPO Different from Others

A valuation above $1 trillion would place OpenAI among the world’s most valuable companies, highlighting the scale of investor expectations around artificial intelligence. Deutsche Bank noted that such a valuation would make OpenAI the 14th biggest company globally by market capitalisation, even though the company has yet to turn profitable. 

The comparison has drawn attention because the companies surrounding OpenAI in market value generate significantly larger revenues and profits. Berkshire Hathaway reported more than $370 billion in revenue and $67 billion in net earnings last year, while Eli Lilly generated sales exceeding $65 billion and profits of around $21 billion. 

OpenAI, meanwhile, is reportedly generating annualised revenue of about $30 billion but has yet to turn profitable. 

The most valuable company is Nvidia, perhaps the nearest thing investors currently have to a large pure-play AI investment, whose shares have surged more than 13 times since the launch of ChatGPT to give it a market capitalisation of $5.4trillion. 

In addition, OpenAI is in a race with Anthropic, which overtook it in sales last month and is on track to generate $40 billion in annual recurring revenue this month, according to data from The Information. 

The maker of Claude may be looking to raise more than $60bn in its own IPO this year, according to media reports, even while it is simultaneously in talks with investors about raising cash at a valuation of $900 billion – nudging it ahead of OpenAI. 

While there may be concerns about the capacity of the market to absorb a number of IPOs valued at several hundred billion dollars this year, they would slot into an US stock market worth about $70 trillion overall. That is five times larger in nominal terms than it was even at the peak of the dot-com bubble in the late 1990s. 

At that time, there was an average of almost 500 IPOs a year, compared with about 120 this decade, and they are typically now coming to market at a more mature stage. 

Even so, it has yet to be seen how public markets will value OpenAI and its peers once they open up their financial statements to scrutiny and explain the still little-understood economics of their business models.