OpenAI Eyes September IPO at Near-Trillion Dollar Valuation

OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, is preparing to file confidentially for an initial public offering that could make it one of the most valuable public companies in the world. The AI pioneer is working with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley on a draft prospectus, with the goal of going public as early as September 2026.

A Legal Victory Clears the Path

The accelerated timeline comes after OpenAI secured a significant legal victory this week over co-founder Elon Musk, who had challenged the company’s transition from a nonprofit to a for-profit structure. With that hurdle cleared, prediction markets now give OpenAI a 78 percent chance of beating rival Anthropic to the public markets. CFO Sarah Friar had previously targeted the second half of 2026 for a filing, but the favorable court ruling has pushed the company to move faster. OpenAI closed a massive 122 billion dollar funding round in March at an 852 billion dollar valuation, and a successful IPO could push that figure toward the one trillion dollar mark.

Big Numbers, Bigger Questions

Despite its dominant position in the artificial intelligence industry, OpenAI faces real financial challenges. The company is projected to lose roughly 14 billion dollars in 2026, as the enormous cost of running large language models, or LLMs, continues to outpace revenue. LLMs are the powerful systems that process and generate human-like text, and training them requires vast amounts of computing power from specialized chips called GPUs. OpenAI has also seen notable executive departures, including former CTO Mira Murati and chief scientist Ilya Sutskever. Still, ChatGPT now boasts over 900 million weekly active users and more than 50 million paying subscribers, while enterprise revenue accounts for over 40 percent of the business. Microsoft, which holds a roughly 27 percent stake valued at approximately 135 billion dollars, stands to benefit significantly from an early listing.

The OpenAI IPO would mark a defining moment for the AI industry, signaling that investor confidence in artificial intelligence remains strong despite ongoing profitability concerns. Whether the company can turn its massive user base into sustainable profits will be the question Wall Street watches most closely.