OpenAI became an icon with the release of the pioneering AI chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022 when central banks around the world were still raising interest rates to stem the rising tide of post-Covid-19 lockdown inflation. Its arrival ended the 2022 bear market and marked the beginning of a new bull market, albeit one that is now sputtering.
2026 is turning out to be a bumper year for equity capital raising on Wall Street. Search giant Google’s parent, Alphabet, recently raised US$84.75 billion ($108.62 billion) in a secondary offering, with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway taking a US$10 billion portion of the placement. Trillionaire Elon Musk’s flagship SpaceX raised a total of US$86.25 billion, including a 15% greenshoe over-allotment last week. SpaceX needs the cash to fund xAI, its fledgling artificial intelligence frontier lab. Anthropic plans to raise US$70 billion in a September IPO. Social media behemoth Meta Platforms, which is forking out US$145 billion on AI capex this year, is in the market to raise US$60 billion in equity through a secondary offering.
Not surprising, then, that on June 8, ChatGPT creator OpenAI announced that it too had submitted a confidential S-1 prospectus to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Just two months ago, OpenAI raised US$122 billion at a US$852 billion valuation. The frontier lab now wants to raise up to US$100 billion in its IPO at a valuation of over US$1 trillion. Anthropic was valued at US$965 billion in its last funding round.
