OpenAI Secretly Files for IPO Before Its Mind-Blowing Cash Burn Catches Up With It
When your AI model is smart enough to write poetry but your business model is just burning mountains of cash, there's only one escape route: dump it on the stock market. OpenAI is rushing to go public, and the reason is as simple as it is terrifying.
The creators of ChatGPT quietly submitted their draft registration to the SEC for a confidential IPO. This sneaky move allows them to prep their Wall Street debut without immediately showing everyone their bleeding balance sheets. Currently, the company boasts a mind-boggling valuation of $852 billion, but behind the scenes, the panic buttons are being pressed.
The Wall Street Journal revealed that CFO Sarah Friar is terrified that OpenAI won't be able to fund its obscene server bills. Even after raising a record-breaking $122 billion in March, including a cool $3 billion squeezed from regular retail investors, the company's appetite for electricity and chips is bottomless. They expect to spend $85 billion this year alone on computing power, with research costs alone projected to eat up another $122 billion by 2028.
Meanwhile, their arch-rivals are smelling blood. Anthropic is whispering to investors that they are actually close to a quarterly profit, pushing their valuation to a cool $1 trillion on secondary markets like Forge Global. Their stock surged 123% this year, while OpenAI managed a sad 11.3% crawl. Even China's DeepSeek just grabbed $7.4 billion in its first external funding round, valuing them at up to $59 billion.
The race to the stock exchange is on, because whoever goes public first gets to grab the remaining gullible retail money before the entire AI compute bubble pops like a cheap balloon.
Source: OpenAI
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