OpenAI has raised $11 billion in new funding at a $1.25 trillion valuation, Bloomberg reported on Friday, November 6, and Reuters confirmed the figures through its own source. It is one of the largest private financings in history. It is also, by OpenAI’s own original ambitions, a disappointment.
The $11 billion is only the first close of a round that has not finished. Bloomberg reports it could total about $20 billion and close in the coming weeks, which would leave up to $9 billion still to sell. OpenAI declined to comment, and no separate announcement appeared on the company’s official news site, so the details rest on Bloomberg’s reporting, as relayed by Reuters and others.
How the round shrank from $30 billion to $11 billion
The numbers tell the story of a cooler market. In late September, Bloomberg reported that OpenAI was seeking $30 billion at a valuation of about $1.4 trillion. Two investors later told Reuters the company had first sought as much as $30 billion at a $1.5 trillion valuation. Then, on October 30, the Financial Times reported that OpenAI had cut the target to about $20 billion and lowered the expected valuation to $1.25 trillion.
Friday’s first close landed at $11 billion, barely more than half of the revised target and less than half of the original ask. CFO Sarah Friar confirmed the $1.25 trillion figure in a CNBC interview the same day, while pushing back on reports of a higher starting price.
| When | Raise target | Valuation | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Late September 2026 | $30 billion | $1.4 trillion | Bloomberg |
| October 30, 2026 | $20 billion | $1.25 trillion | Financial Times |
| November 6, 2026 | $11 billion closed so far | $1.25 trillion | Bloomberg, Reuters |
Who is writing the checks
SoftBank and Abu Dhabi’s MGX participated in the first close, according to investors who spoke to Reuters. Other participants in the round include Coatue Management and T. Rowe Price, Bloomberg said, plus Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, and a United Arab Emirates consortium, according to The Decoder.
The list is a familiar one. SoftBank led OpenAI’s previous round, and the Gulf funds have become regular backers of frontier AI labs. What is new is the price they negotiated: $1.25 trillion is about 47 percent above the $852 billion post-money valuation OpenAI set in March, when it raised $122 billion in a round led by Nvidia, Amazon, and SoftBank. That March round was itself a record. In eight months, the company’s paper value has climbed by roughly $400 billion, even as the market’s appetite for AI bets has cooled.
Why investors got cautious
The Financial Times linked the cut to mounting anxiety about AI spending. Public AI stocks sold off after the midterm elections, and investors have grown more skeptical about data-center build-outs and the returns on them. OpenAI has also delayed its IPO plans, leaning on private capital instead, and it is expected to brief investors on third-quarter results next week, according to The Information.
The timing matters because the money has a job to do. OpenAI is building out enormous computing capacity, and it has been shopping for chips from unusual places: in October we reported that OpenAI wants to buy Google AI chips, a deal that would put the ChatGPT maker on its biggest rival’s hardware. Data-center spending is the reason the round exists at all, and it is also the reason investors are asking harder questions than they were in March.
What $1.25 trillion actually means
A private valuation is not a market price. It is the figure a small group of investors negotiated with the company, and nobody outside the round can buy in at that price. The round has not closed, so both the final size and the headline valuation could still change before the second tranche lands.
Still, the first close is the clearest sign yet that even the world’s most valuable private AI company negotiates against a cooler market. In March, OpenAI raised $122 billion without apparent difficulty. In November, it closed $11 billion of a $20 billion target, after cutting its ask by a third. The company is worth far more than it was, and it is raising far less than it wanted. Both facts are true at once, and the gap between them is the story of the AI market in late 2026.
The contrast with the open-weights world is striking. While OpenAI raises billions in private, rivals are giving models away: Moonshot’s Kimi K3.1 Pro weights are free to download, and the best AI agent on a new independent test scores just 12 percent, with the cheap runner-up as the real story. OpenAI’s bet is that scale, and the compute this round pays for, still wins. The next few weeks, as the second tranche closes or does not, will show whether investors agree.
