OpenAI has reached an implied valuation of $1 trillion ahead of its IPO, putting it in the middle of a high-stakes race with SpaceX and Anthropic for the next giant public listing, according to data from trading of pre-IPO instruments on a chain backed 1:1 by SPV exposure to Jupiter.
These tools now give traders a live read on what the market thinks OpenAI could be worth when it finally goes public.
This implied value has risen 163% since October 2025, when talk of a potential $1 trillion-plus IPO first began. SpaceX is reportedly aiming for more than $1.7 trillion, while Anthropic is also nearing the same $1 trillion line.
When OpenAI was created, AI was “beneficial to humanity” and preventing some giant corporation from controlling the entire field.
This goal makes OpenAI look different from Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, which built their businesses around closed systems and tight oversight of products and profits.
OpenAI is abandoning its old model as AI costs pile up quickly
Initially, OpenAI focused on open research and knowledge sharing. This idea is built right into the name. Then the money problem became too big to ignore. Generative AI is expensive in a way that regular software is not. A copy of old-school software costs almost nothing to replicate at scale. Artificial intelligence doesn’t work that way. Each claim uses computing power, electricity, and specialized hardware.
A basic ChatGPT exchange of one question and one answer can cost between $0.01 and $0.10. A high definition image can cost between $0.10 and $0.20.
This may seem small until usage reaches billions of requests per day in 2026. The heavy lifting comes from GPUs, mostly provided by Nvidia. These chips can cost tens of thousands of dollars to purchase, and cloud access can cost several dollars per hour per chip.
OpenAI and its competitors need tens of thousands of them running all the time in large data centers. Some estimates indicate that the investment required could reach hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of this decade.
This pressure had already become evident by late 2010. A pure nonprofit structure could not keep up with this kind of spending.
So, in 2019, OpenAI adopted a hybrid structure that allows it to raise capital while maintaining control under the foundation. This was the company’s first real step toward market logic, even if it was still trying to maintain part of its original mission.
OpenAI benefits from ChatGPT growth while Anthropic stumbles on Claude Code pricing
ChatGPT then threw the doors open in late 2022, attracting 100 million users in just two months. By early 2026, the number of users exceeded 900 million weekly users. Revenues followed the same path. OpenAI’s value has risen from about $200 million in 2022 to more than $10 billion in 2025.
This represents a 60-fold jump in three years. Consumer subscriptions now range from $20 to $200 per month, while enterprise plans cost about $25 to $60 per user each month, meaning a company with 10,000 employees could turn in multi-million dollar annual revenue.
As OpenAI heads toward an IPO, Anthropic has been dealing with price backlash. The issue started when users on social media noticed that Claude Code was no longer available for pro users on Anthropic’s pricing page.
If this had been a complete change, it would have meant that the coding tool would no longer be part of the $20 per month plan and would instead require a $100 per month subscription. Users did not take this 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 subscriptions.
During the confusion, Sam Altman and other OpenAI employees jumped in and used the moment to direct attention toward Codex, OpenAI’s competing programming tool.
Sam responded to Anthropic’s head of growth with “ok Boomer” and then to publish“I just had two drinks.”
