The transaction makes OpenAI the most valuable private company in the world, surpassing Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is valued at $456 billion.

The deal was structured as a secondary sale, allowing staff and former insiders to cash out without the company going public. OpenAI had authorised up to $10.3 billion in stock sales, but only two-thirds were sold. Internally, this limitation is seen as a sign that many employees trust the company’s long-term prospects.

The investor mix also reveals the scale of interest in OpenAI’s growth. Thrive Capital, SoftBank, Dragoneer Investment Group, Abu Dhabi’s MGX, and T. Rowe Price all bought into the round. SoftBank had already backed OpenAI in its $40 billion primary funding earlier this year, making this a reinforcement of its position.

Financially, the company is growing at a speed that few in Silicon Valley have matched. In the first half of 2025, OpenAI generated about $4.3 billion in revenue, already 16% higher than its full-year revenue for 2024. 

That growth has pushed the company into a league where it stands at the forefront of artificial intelligence and also sits at the centre of the global technology economy.

Alongside the capital raise, OpenAI is also exploring structural changes. Reports reveal the company is in talks with Microsoft to transition into a public benefit corporation. If completed, OpenAI’s nonprofit board would retain governance power, while its commercial arm would continue expanding at scale.

The timing of the share sale shows high competition for talent across the sector. Meta has gone as far as offering nine-figure compensation packages and recently hired Alexandr Wang, the 28-year-old co-founder of Scale AI, to head its new superintelligence unit.

For OpenAI, the secondary sale does more than unlock employee liquidity. It functions as a retention strategy, a way to keep top engineers and researchers from defecting to rivals. Other high-value private companies such as Stripe, Databricks, and SpaceX have adopted similar tactics.

With this new valuation, Analysts say OpenAI has shown it can translate massive infrastructure and talent into recurring revenue streams. Billions already flow in and product adoption is growing continuously, hence, OpenAI now looks less like a risky investment and more like an indispensable pillar of the modern technology economy.

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But the growth comes with a price, where massive spending on research and development is driving heavy losses.

According to financial disclosures seen by The Information, the company spent $6.7 billion on R&D in the first half of the year, most of it tied to training models and maintaining the infrastructure behind ChatGPT. That pushed its cash burn to $2.5 billion, with its ability to strike a balance between rapid expansion and steep operating costs in question.

Despite the high outflow, OpenAI appears to be on solid footing for now. It closed June with around $17.5 billion in cash and securities, enough to sustain its aggressive investment strategy while targeting $13 billion in revenue and $8.5 billion in full-year cash burn by December.

The company is also manoeuvring to ensure value for insiders. In August, OpenAI entered early-stage talks for a stock sale that would allow employees to cash out, a deal that could peg its valuation at about $500 billion. That figure would place the firm among the most valuable technology companies worldwide, highlighting investor belief in its dominance in generative AI.

Growth around OpenAI has been strengthened by its deepening ties with chipmaker Nvidia. Earlier this month, Nvidia announced it would commit as much as $100 billion to support the firm, supplying high-performance data-centre chips to bolster training and inference at scale. This shows the growing demand for AI hardware but also the interdependence between model developers and infrastructure providers.

For competitors such as Anthropic and Google DeepMind, the challenge is increasing. OpenAI’s integration into Microsoft Copilot is spreading across industries from healthcare to finance, giving it a commercial reach that few competitors can match. 

Its spending levels are also setting new benchmarks for research intensity, with consequences for talent competition, regulation, and industry standards.

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