OpenAI eyes trillion-dollar IPO amid global AI arms race: Report

Artificial intelligence company OpenAI is reportedly preparing an initial public offering (IPO) for late 2026, which could see the world’s largest startup reach a trillion-dollar valuation.

The AI company is reportedly preparing to launch its IPO at a $1 trillion valuation, which would include a $60 billion capital raise, to three anonymous sources familiar with the matter, Reuters reported on Thursday.

The filing may reach US securities regulators in the second half of 2026, putting OpenAI on track to debut on public markets ahead of its previously announced 2027 target.

However, a spokesperson for OpenAI told Reuters that there is no set date for the IPO, as the company’s primary focus remains the development of artificial general intelligence (AGI). “We are building ‌a durable business and advancing our mission so everyone benefits from AGI,” they said.

The size of the potential offering signals growing institutional interest in AI development, particularly for OpenAI, which became the world’s largest startup after reaching a in a secondary share sale on Oct. 2.

During the share sales, OpenAI employees sold a cumulative $6.6 billion in stock to large corporate investors. The round saw OpenAI’s $500 billion valuation surpass that of Elon Musk’s SpaceX startup, which had a valuation of $400 billion.

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Despite its growing budget, OpenAI’s flagship product ChatGPT has recently been outperformed in one niche area: autonomous crypto trading.

During an autonomous crypto trading competition, Chinese and Qwen3 Max briefly overtook ChatGPT and Grok .

DeepSeek was the only AI model to generate a positive trading return of about 9% as of Oct. 22, while ChatGPT-5 slipped to last place after a 66% loss.

The results came as a surprise, considering that DeepSeek was developed at a total training cost of $5.3 million, a small fraction of OpenAI’s $5.7 billion spend on research and development initiatives during the first half of 2025 alone.

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However, the right prompts and improved training data may improve the trading performance of some of these AI models, particularly for ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, according to Nicolai Sondergaard, research analyst at crypto intelligence platform Nansen.

“Assuming all models received the same prompts and instructions for trading, it can be assumed that the difference lies in the data each model has been trained on,” he told Cointelegraph.

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