OpenAI’s annualized revenue has exceeded $40 billion, driven by strong growth in programming tools and subscription businesses, but its IPO plans have been postponed from this fall to 2027. The core conflict lies in CEO Sam Altman’s insistence on a trillion-dollar valuation. The company is fiercely competing with Anthropic for enterprise customers and has paved the way for an IPO through a $7 billion employee share buyback, but massive losses and cash burn have raised investor concerns, while volatile market conditions have also dampened retail investor enthusiasm. The delay buys OpenAI time to improve its financial performance and business structure, but it also faces the pressure of competitors going public first.
OpenAI co-founder and president Greg Brockman stated that the company’s annualized revenue grew more than 20% month-over-month in July. Recently, OpenAI has seen a notable rise in demand for AI agent products, with representative offerings including the programming tool Codex and the general-purpose assistant ChatGPT Work. To respond more flexibly to challenges from Anthropic and numerous other competitors, OpenAI has cut prices on some models. On Thursday, OpenAI appointed its second chief revenue officer in less than a year and brought in a cybersecurity executive to help drive sales growth.
According to reports, OpenAI has stepped back significantly from its initial ambition of “going public as soon as this fall” and now clearly leans toward postponing its IPO timeline to 2027. Behind this delay is the clash between CEO Sam Altman’s insistence on a trillion-dollar valuation floor and market realities. Bankers advising OpenAI on the IPO have explicitly warned that recent sharp volatility in tech stocks and the substantial pullback in SpaceX’s (SPCX) post-IPO share price could severely dampen retail investor enthusiasm for OpenAI’s offering.
The valuation dilemma is the core conflict driving the postponement decision. In March 2026, OpenAI completed a $122 billion financing round at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, already making it the world’s highest-valued privately held tech company. However, Altman has been urging his advisory team to find ways to push the company’s IPO valuation to $1 trillion. The advisory team has proposed two options: first, delaying the IPO to 2027 to wait for improved market conditions while allowing the company’s financial performance to move closer to the trillion-dollar valuation target; second, going public before the end of 2026 but accepting a lower valuation. According to a person who has spoken with Altman, he has stated that any plan that cuts valuation below $1 trillion is “a non-starter.”
At the same time, OpenAI’s financial condition is testing investor patience. The company posted a net loss of $38.5 billion last year, primarily driven by massive expenditures on computing infrastructure, R&D, and corporate restructuring. According to The Information, OpenAI burned $3.7 billion in cash in the first quarter of 2026, exceeding half of its $5.7 billion in revenue for the same period. The company expects to invest $600 billion in computing and hardware by 2030. In recent months, some of OpenAI’s largest investors have privately expressed concern over the company’s pace of cash burn relative to its growth, while other investors have hedged their bets on OpenAI by allocating capital to Anthropic.
Analysts note that the large-model enterprise IPO originally scheduled for the second half of 2026 may be postponed to the first half of 2027 due to declining market risk appetite and uncertainties in liquidity conditions. The most straightforward interpretation of the 2027 timeline is that OpenAI has the capacity to wait. By delaying, the company can continue to scale usage, refine pricing, and seek a more stable business mix among consumer products, enterprise tools, and infrastructure partners before entering the public markets and subjecting itself to quarterly discipline.
