OpenAI is preparing an IPO in 2026 that could value the company at 1 trillion dollars, Reuters reported, citing three unnamed sources. The planned OpenAI IPO may include a 60 billion dollar capital raise, making it one of the biggest public listings in tech. The filing could reach U.S. regulators in the second half of 2026, which is earlier than the previously mentioned 2027 window.
An OpenAI spokesperson told Reuters there is no set IPO date and said the company is focused on building AGI. “We are building a durable business and advancing our mission so everyone benefits from AGI,” the spokesperson said. The statement shows OpenAI wants to keep the AGI mission at the center while preparing for public markets. The report did not name the underwriters.
The AI arms race is the backdrop. U.S., European, and Chinese companies are competing for compute, data, and talent. A trillion dollar valuation would give OpenAI room to keep training large models while rivals receive state or corporate backing.
From 500 Billion Dollars to Public Markets
The IPO plan follows a secondary share sale on Oct. 2 that valued OpenAI at 500 billion dollars. In that sale, employees sold 6.6 billion dollars worth of shares to institutional buyers. That deal made OpenAI the largest startup by valuation, ahead of SpaceX at about 400 billion dollars. The 2026 OpenAI IPO therefore builds on an already established private-market price.
The reported 60 billion dollar raise shows that the company needs long-term financing for model training and infrastructure. Reuters noted that OpenAI spent 5.7 billion dollars on R&D in the first half of 2025. That level of spending is uncommon for a private startup and explains the push toward public funding. A listed OpenAI would also give large asset managers and sovereign funds a way to gain exposure to AI infrastructure.
The move fits the market phase: capital is shifting from early private rounds to public vehicles as AI models get more expensive. The OpenAI IPO would come at the point where model training, inference, and deployment require stable funding, not opportunistic rounds.
Chinese AI Models Outperform ChatGPT in Crypto Trading Test
At the same time, OpenAI’s main product ChatGPT did not lead in a recent autonomous crypto trading competition monitored by CoinGlass. Chinese AI models DeepSeek and Qwen3 Max briefly ranked above ChatGPT and Grok in that test. DeepSeek was the only model to post a positive return of about 9 percent as of Oct. 22. ChatGPT-5 recorded a 66 percent loss and fell to the bottom of the table.
The result drew attention because DeepSeek was trained for about 5.3 million dollars, while OpenAI spent 5.7 billion dollars on R&D in just six months of 2025. The data showed that task-focused Chinese AI systems can perform better in narrow trading environments than larger, general-purpose chatbots.
Model Training and Data Quality
According to Nicolai Sondergaard, research analyst at Nansen, better prompts and improved training data could lift the trading performance of western models such as ChatGPT and Google Gemini. He said model results in trading are sensitive to input structure and dataset quality. That means weaker results in one competition do not fix long-term rankings across AI products.
The trading test also showed that the AI arms race now includes crypto trading, not only general chat. Chinese AI firms are deploying models in real-time financial settings, while U.S. firms are scaling broad chat systems. As OpenAI moves toward a 2026 IPO at a trillion dollar valuation, it will have to present both its AGI roadmap and the way ChatGPT can compete in specialist tasks such as finance and markets.
