OpenAI’s Next Round

This week, we and others reported that OpenAI has been in early talks with investors about a new private round that could value it at $1.2 trillion or more. That follows CEO Sam Altman’s recent statement that an initial public offering wouldn’t happen this year, not that anyone was actually expecting that!

There are plenty of unanswered questions about the recent turn of events. But the biggest—why stay private?—seems obvious. It buys the company more time to rev up sales without the pressure of disclosing on how much it’s paying for that growth, such as offering margin-crushing discounts to lure business from rival Anthropic.