OpenAI confidentially filed IPO papers with the SEC yesterday, setting the stage for yet another massive tech company float later in the year. You can read OpenAI’s statement here. It’s very short. Here is the entire thing, verbatim:
“We recently submitted a confidential S-1. We expect it to leak so we’re just announcing it. We have not decided on timing yet; it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company. But it’s a complicated set of tradeoffs and this gives us the option to go public sooner if that ends up being best.”
The most interesting aspect of that statement are the words “we expect it to leak,” which suggest the company was rushed into making the statement—or at least didn’t want to be rushed into making it and thus got its retaliation in first, so to speak.
The valuation is expected to be greater than $1 trillion, per the FT. It was most recently valued at $852 billion.
That would make it the third $1 trillion-plus IPO expected this year, following SpaceX ($1.78 trillion) and Anthropic (last valued at $965 billion). The Wall Street Journal has a great story about the vast firehose of money pouring into AI right now. $159 billion in bond funding this year alone, for instance, including some really offbeat vehicles such as Google’s 100-year bond, at a yield of 6.05%, denominated in British pounds sterling.
