The big questions looming over OpenAI’s trillion-dollar IPO

Open AI’s hotly anticipated IPO may be coming sooner than expected. Hot on the heels of co-founder Elon Musk filing for a trillion-dollar Space X offering, the Chat GPT maker is preparing to file its own confidential IPO paperwork, according to a report from the Wall Street Journal. The filing could pave the way for a public listing as soon as September. The AI lab’s last ​private funding round valued the company at $852 billion, but the company could be valued at up to $1 trillion by the time it goes public. A $1 trillion IPO, which would closely follow SpaceX’s record-breaking listing, would be one of the largest wealth events in Silicon Valley history. It would also test whether public markets are willing to bankroll the staggering cost of the AI race and back the heavily loss-making OpenAI. OpenAI remains deeply unprofitable, and executives have reportedly grown concerned about whether the company could finance future compute contracts after missing internal revenue and user-growth targets. The company’s need for data centers, chips, and cloud capacity means it needs to keep spending, and investors will have to decide whether they believe the company can turn that spending into durable profits. Its debut would also set the tone for the next wave of AI listings, including OpenAI’s arch rival Anthropic, which is reportedly aiming for its own IPO later this year. It’s unclear when exactly the company plans to file the paperwork or go public. Companies are allowed to file confidentially with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission and receive feedback from the regulator before making their S-1 public at a time of their choosing. But the S-1 must be published at least 15 days before the company begins its “road show” to sell its initial order book of shares to investors. That road show, in turn, usually takes place about one to two weeks before the company conducts the IPO. It has been reported that OpenAI may make its confidential filing with the