OpenAI reportedly cuts new funding round target to $20 billion

OpenAI has lowered the target for its latest funding round to $20 billion, down from earlier figures of $30 billion, the Financial Times reported Friday. The paper said the round’s first close, the initial batch of committed money, is expected to land even lower than that new $20 billion goal.

The round had previously been described as targeting a $1.4 trillion valuation for OpenAI, and later a $1.25 trillion valuation, as the company moves toward a planned initial public offering. According to the Financial Times, a group of investors from the United Arab Emirates is set to lead this round. A separate offering aimed at wealthy individual investors could follow and help push the total raised closer to the $20 billion target, the paper said.

The Wall Street Journal added further detail in its own report, saying OpenAI has secured $11 billion toward the round so far. The Journal said the company’s fundraising push has met a “tepid” response from some large investors, though neither report named which investors pulled back or why.

TechCrunch, which compiled the Financial Times and Wall Street Journal reporting, said it had reached out to OpenAI for comment. As of that report, OpenAI had not responded publicly to the figures or to characterizations of investor demand.

A tougher market for AI infrastructure bets

TechCrunch linked OpenAI’s fundraising difficulty partly to timing. Wall Street investors have grown more cautious about the scale of spending on AI infrastructure, the computing capacity, chips and data centers needed to train and run large AI models, and that caution has contributed to a sell-off in technology stocks, according to the outlet. TechCrunch also noted that Anthropic’s own planned IPO could be facing separate challenges, though it did not provide specifics on what those challenges are.

Neither the Financial Times nor the Wall Street Journal reporting, as relayed by TechCrunch, specified why large investors responded tepidly, or whether the UAE-led group’s commitment is final. The size of the eventual retail offering to individual investors, and whether it will be enough to close the gap to $20 billion, is also not yet known.

What to watch next: whether OpenAI confirms or disputes the $20 billion figure and the $11 billion secured so far, whether the UAE-led investor group finalizes its commitment, and whether the broader pullback from AI infrastructure spending that TechCrunch described continues to weigh on OpenAI’s round or on Anthropic’s IPO plans.