OpenAI hits a $1 trillion valuation in race with SpaceX to become AI’s first mega IPO

OpenAI has reached an implied $1 trillion pre-IPO valuation, putting it in the middle of a high-stakes race with SpaceX and Anthropic for the next giant public listing, according to data from pre-IPO instruments trading onchain backed 1:1 by SPV exposure on Jupiter.

Those instruments are now giving traders a live read on what the market thinks OpenAI could be worth when it finally goes public.

That implied value is up 163% from October 2025, when talk of a possible $1 trillion-plus IPO first started making the rounds. SpaceX is reportedly aiming for more than $1.7 trillion, while Anthropic is also getting close to the same $1 trillion line.

When OpenAI was built AI that would be “beneficial to humanity” and stop a few giant firms from controlling the whole field.

That goal made OpenAI look different from Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, which built their businesses around closed systems and tight control over products and profits.

OpenAI drops its old model as AI costs pile up fast

At first, OpenAI leaned into open research and sharing knowledge. That idea was built right into the name. Then the money problem got too big to ignore. Generative AI is expensive in a way normal software is not. A copy of old-school software costs almost nothing to duplicate at scale. AI does not work like that. Every prompt uses computing power, electricity, and specialized hardware.

A basic ChatGPT exchange, one question and one answer, can cost anywhere from $0.01 to $0.10. A high-definition image can cost $0.10 to $0.20.

That sounds small until usage runs into the billions of requests a day in 2026. The heavy lifting comes from GPUs, mostly supplied by Nvidia. Those chips can cost tens of thousands of dollars to buy, and cloud access can also run several dollars per hour for each chip.

OpenAI and its rivals need tens of thousands of them running all the time in large data centers. Some estimates say the investment needed could climb into the hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of this decade.

That pressure had already become obvious by the late 2010s. A pure nonprofit structure could not keep up with that kind of spending.

So in 2019, OpenAI adopted a hybrid structure that let it raise capital while keeping control under a foundation. That was the company’s first real step toward market logic, even if it still tried to keep part of its original mission alive.

OpenAI cashes in on ChatGPT growth while Anthropic stumbles over Claude Code pricing

Then ChatGPT blew the doors open in late 2022, pulling 100 million users in just two months. By early 2026, it had passed 900 million weekly users. Revenue followed the same path. OpenAI went from about $200 million in 2022 to more than $10 billion in 2025.

That is a 60-fold jump in three years. Consumer subscriptions now range from $20 to $200 a month, while enterprise plans cost around $25 to $60 per user each month, meaning a business with 10,000 employees can therefore turn into several million dollars in annual revenue.

While OpenAI pushes toward an IPO, Anthropic has been dealing with pricing backlash. The issue started when users on social media noticed that Claude Code was no longer shown as available for Pro users on Anthropic’s pricing page.

If that had been a full change, it would have meant the coding tool was no longer part of the $20-a-month plan and would instead require a $100-a-month subscription. Users did not take that well.

Anthropic later said nothing had changed for existing users and said the pricing page was part of an experiment that affected only 2% of new sign-ups.

During that confusion, Sam Altman and other OpenAI staff jumped in and used the moment to steer attention toward Codex, OpenAI’s competing coding tool.

Sam replied to Anthropic’s head of growth with “ok boomer” and then posted, “tongiht i have had a couple of drinks.”

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