OpenAI seeks $1.4 trillion the same day it cut the price of intelligence fivefold

One stage, two price moves

At DevDay in San Francisco on Tuesday, Sam Altman sold developers GPT-6.1 Sol: near-Astra intelligence at one-fifth of Astra's token prices, $2 per million input tokens and $0.10 cached ¹. A different price landed the same morning. OpenAI is in talks to raise at least $30 billion at a valuation near $1.4 trillion↗, excluding the new money, after pushing its listing to next year↗ ²³⁴.

March's paper is still waiting

The last private raise, $122 billion in March, closed at an $852 billion valuation with equity led by Nvidia, Amazon and SoftBank, and was framed as the money that would carry OpenAI to a listing ⁵⁶. Altman has since called 2026 "an ill-advised moment" for an IPO: "I think it is unacceptable to be taking like a 10% chance of killing everybody by the end of the decade" ⁴. The new round is a bridge in place of the listing ²³.

A 64% markup with no exit date

At $1.4 trillion, the ask sits roughly 64% above March's mark, on a line that has already run from $157 billion in October 2024 to $500 billion a year later ⁶⁷. PitchBook analyst Harrison Rolfes calls it "a capital raise, not price discovery": OpenAI spent about $34 billion last year, and nothing is priced yet ⁶. Secondary trades in September implied closer to $475 billion, a 44% discount to the primary mark ⁷.

The unit price of intelligence is falling

Sol is the only new model OpenAI was willing to ship this week: GPT-6.1 Astra stays locked, pulled Monday for missing the company's safety bar ⁸⁹. Sol finishes a scientific task for an average $5.47↗, against $23.80 for Astra and $23.21 for Anthropic's Opus 5.5 ¹. The cuts are competitive, not charity: OpenAI has been discounting to "compete for cost-conscious customers against Anthropic and a growing list of Chinese rivals" ¹⁰.

Revenue is outrunning the cuts

Deflation has not reached the top line yet: annualized revenue ran near $40 billion in August↗, roughly double the end of 2025 ¹⁰, and about $68 billion by Tuesday, up more than 70% since the quarter began, with enterprise sales more than doubling since July ⁸¹¹. The audited 2025 ledger still shows a $38.5 billion net loss on $13.07 billion of revenue↗ ¹¹. Oracle, the compute partner, rose 5.3% on the readout ¹¹.

Watch the term sheet, then Anthropic

CFO Sarah Friar declined to discuss the talks and called OpenAI "very well capitalized"; Altman says he has no timeline for a listing↗ ⁸. Anthropic has filed confidentially and could list this fall ³. When the first lab prices publicly, every private mark inherits a judge.