What happened
OpenAI is in advanced talks to raise up to $30 billion in a new private funding round at a $1. 25 trillion valuation, CryptoBriefing reported Wednesday evening, citing people familiar with the matter. UAE-based investors and Coatue Management are leading the round.
The deal, if it closes at the reported terms, lands roughly a year after OpenAI's $6. 6 billion raise in late 2024 at a $157 billion valuation and marks an eight-fold mark-up in about 24 months. The round is being structured as a pre-IPO vehicle, with sources telling CryptoBriefing a public listing is being targeted for 2027.
Neither OpenAI nor Coatue had commented publicly at the time of publication.
Why it matters
A $1. 25 trillion mark would make OpenAI the most valuable private company in history, ahead of ByteDance (last pegged near $300B) and SpaceX (around $400B as of mid-2026). It is also a direct signal from a specific class of allocators: sovereign capital out of the Gulf and crossover funds like Coatue.
UAE involvement, specifically from vehicles tied to MGX and the broader Abu Dhabi ecosystem, extends a thesis the region has been pushing since early 2024: become a core LP in frontier compute. That matters for crypto because the same balance sheets have been funding AI compute buildouts, GPU clusters, and the hyperscaler plumbing that AI-adjacent token projects are trying to plug into.
When OpenAI's cost of capital compresses, so does the entire AI stack's.