Tech and AI

OpenAI closes 11 billion dollars of a new funding round at a 1.25 trillion dollar valuation and says it will keep building data centres

By Staff Writer  |  8 November 2026

The company's chief financial officer said the midterm vote against data centres would not stop its spending, as the round falls short of the 30 billion dollars it was said to be seeking in September.

OpenAI has closed an initial 11 billion dollar portion of a new funding round that values the company at 1.25 trillion dollars. The first tranche was confirmed on Friday 6 November, and the company could raise up to a further 9 billion dollars in the coming weeks, which would bring the round to about 20 billion dollars.

That is well below the figure reported in late September, when OpenAI was said to be looking for 30 billion dollars at a valuation of 1.4 trillion dollars. In March it raised 122 billion dollars from investors at a valuation of 852 billion dollars.

The finance chief on the election

Sarah Friar, OpenAI's chief financial officer, spoke on Friday at an industry conference in Pebble Beach, California, three days after voters in the United States midterm elections backed curbs on data centre building. Of 41 local ballot measures across 10 states, voters supported restrictions or rejected development in all but one.

Friar said that the result did not change the company's plans, because demand from customers had to be met whatever the political mood.

When I think about the midterms, I need to keep thinking about how do we keep investing to meet that customer demand.

Sarah Friar, Chief Financial Officer, OpenAI

She added that meeting that demand "will continue to mean that we raise capital", and that if the vote meant more attention on data centres and the communities around them, OpenAI would keep working to earn their trust.

She described the round as ongoing and added that "a good CFO always raises money when she can". On demand, she was blunt: "The demand for AI is real."

On Thursday OpenAI published a policy blueprint setting out commitments it will apply to the data centres it owns and operates in future, including on how it deals with local communities.

A market under strain

The first tranche closed at the end of a hard week for technology shares. On Thursday the Nasdaq suffered its steepest fall in 19 months, led by chipmakers and the cloud computing companies most closely tied to building capacity for artificial intelligence. The shares recovered part of the loss on Friday.

OpenAI filed its prospectus confidentially with the Securities and Exchange Commission in June. Friar said the company is still looking at a stock market debut in 2027. Its rival Anthropic filed its own registration statement last week and is aiming to list on the Nasdaq in mid-November. That prospectus shows revenue of 33.2 billion dollars in the first nine months of the year, up about 1,200 per cent, and purchase and lease commitments of about 895.4 billion dollars, almost all of it for computing and infrastructure.

For investors, the open question is whether the building programme behind that demand can be paid for and delivered on time. OpenAI's answer, for now, is to keep raising money and keep building.