- Lead. OpenAI is weighing a delay of its initial public offering until 2027, after advisers told executives the company cannot reach a $1 trillion valuation on the current timeline, the New York Times reported on June 25.
- Fact. CFO Sarah Friar has told associates the company leans toward a 2027 listing, citing $600 billion in committed infrastructure spending and the difficulty of meeting public-company reporting standards on a faster schedule. CEO Sam Altman told advisers that any valuation below $1 trillion is a “non-starter.” SoftBank, a major OpenAI investor, lost approximately $38 billion in market capitalisation following the report.
- Stake. OpenAI filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 8 at a private valuation of $852 billion. A 2027 delay would give Anthropic—which filed its own S-1 on June 1 at a $965 billion valuation—a clear path to becoming the first frontier AI lab to list publicly.
The $1 trillion problem
OpenAI’s advisers presented executives with a binary choice: list in 2026 at a valuation that markets can support today, or wait until 2027 and build the revenue trajectory that would substantiate the $1 trillion floor. Altman’s answer was immediate. A discount to the target was, in his telling, simply not on the table.
The number carries symbolic weight beyond arithmetic. A $1 trillion listing would make OpenAI the most valuable company in history to go public at its offering price, exceeding Anthropic’s $965 billion private valuation and placing OpenAI alongside the largest public technology companies in the world from its first day of trading. That framing—OpenAI as a company in a category of its own—is central to Altman’s public positioning, and a lower listing price would undermine it before the first bell.
The Friar constraint
Two practical obstacles make a 2026 filing difficult independent of valuation. The first is $600 billion in long-term infrastructure spending commitments—predominantly to Microsoft, OpenAI’s primary cloud partner—which would require unusual disclosure treatment in a prospectus. The second is the time required to bring OpenAI’s internal financial reporting infrastructure up to the standard US public-company rules require.
CFO Sarah Friar, who joined OpenAI in 2024 after running Nextdoor Holdings, has conveyed both concerns to associates. Together they make a late-2026 filing legally and operationally fraught regardless of investor sentiment. A 2027 timeline would allow the company to resolve both while OpenAI’s revenue—growing rapidly but difficult to project given the pace of model development—has more time to reach levels that substantiate Altman’s valuation demand.
Market reaction and the SpaceX parallel
The Nasdaq fell 0.24% on June 26 as the report circulated. Chip stocks declined in sympathy: Arm Holdings lost 4%, Marvell Technology fell 4%, and AMD dropped 3.5%. The Magnificent Seven index lost 5.5% across the week ending June 27, with the Nasdaq down 4.6% over the same period.
The SpaceX IPO added cautionary context. SpaceX priced at $135 per share on June 11, briefly traded above $225, and had retreated to around $152 by late June—nearly back to its listing price after a series of double-digit daily declines. The retreat cooled some of the euphoria that had lifted AI and space-sector valuations in the first half of June, leaving OpenAI’s public debut as the next major test of investor appetite for frontier AI at any price.