【OpenAI quietly “cuts” its valuation: AI hot money starts looking for value】
According to Bloomberg, OpenAI has completed the first closing of a funding round worth about $11 billion, at a valuation of $1.25 trillion. The entire round could reach as much as $20 billion, with the remainder expected to arrive over the next few weeks.
Three signals worth examining closely:
1. The valuation has been lowered from the original target of $1.4 trillion to $1.25 trillion, while the fundraising goal has also shrunk from at least $30 billion. The immediate trigger was a sell-off in AI stocks on public markets, forcing private markets to reprice—the hottest sectors can’t escape the pull of public-market benchmarks.
2. The roster of investors remains impressive: Coatue and T. Rowe Price participated in the first closing, while SoftBank, Sequoia, a16z, Founders Fund, and UAE investors are also involved. Top-tier VCs and long-term Middle Eastern capital continue to increase their investments, suggesting that it’s short-term valuations—not the long-term thesis—that are being revised.
3. Compared with the $122 billion funding round in March this year, which valued the company at $852 billion, the valuation is still up about 47% in eight months. But the pace of fundraising has clearly slowed, and investors are no longer blindly chasing higher prices.
The implications for crypto markets: Sentiment around AI-themed tokens is increasingly tied to that of AI stocks, and when public markets pull back, on-chain AI narratives often cool at the same time. Capital is still flowing into private markets, but a lower valuation benchmark signals that investors are becoming less tolerant of “burning cash for growth.” In the short term, sentiment swings matter; over the long term, it comes down to who can turn model capabilities into real cash flow.
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