OpenAI is working on a $30 billion funding round that would value the company at $1.25 trillion, according to TechCrunch. If the deal closes, it would make OpenAI the most valuable private company in history.

The round is happening as OpenAI prepares for an initial public offering, though the company hasn’t disclosed timing. The $1.25 trillion valuation would put OpenAI ahead of every private company that came before it. For context, SpaceX’s most recent valuation sits around $350 billion.

This isn’t OpenAI’s first massive raise. The company closed a $6.6 billion round in October 2024 at a $157 billion valuation, led by Thrive Capital with participation from Microsoft, Nvidia, and SoftBank. That round included unusual terms that required OpenAI to restructure away from its nonprofit governance structure within two years or return the money at just 1.25% annual interest. The restructuring happened. Now the company is back for more capital, at nearly eight times that valuation.

The timing matters. OpenAI is spending heavily on compute, research, and product development. The company has said it expects to burn through billions as it scales its models and infrastructure. Revenue is growing, reportedly hitting $4 billion annualized earlier this year, but the path to profitability at this scale requires sustained investment.

DeepSeek raises $15B days after US restrictions

While OpenAI pursues record-breaking capital in the US, DeepSeek has reportedly raised $15 billion in China, just days after the US government ordered federal agencies to remove its technology over national security concerns.

The DeepSeek round ranks as one of the largest funding events in Chinese tech history. The timing is striking. The US restrictions came first, targeting DeepSeek’s presence in government systems. Then the funding closed, signaling that Chinese investors see the US crackdown as validation, not a warning.

DeepSeek has gained attention for its open models and competitive performance benchmarks. The company’s R1 reasoning model, released earlier this year, demonstrated strong capabilities on complex tasks while using what the company claimed was less compute than comparable American models. That efficiency narrative resonated in China, where access to cutting-edge chips remains constrained by US export controls.

The $15 billion gives DeepSeek resources to scale. It also sends a signal: China’s AI ecosystem isn’t slowing down in response to US pressure. If anything, the restrictions seem to be accelerating capital formation around domestic alternatives.

What this tells us

These two deals, happening within days of each other, illustrate how AI development is fragmenting along geopolitical lines. OpenAI’s raise assumes continued access to global capital markets, US chip supply chains, and hyperscale cloud infrastructure. DeepSeek’s raise assumes the opposite: that Chinese companies will need to build a parallel stack, funded domestically, optimized for constrained hardware access.

Both assumptions could be right. The industry is big enough now that multiple trillion-dollar outcomes can coexist. But the bifurcation creates risks. Models trained in isolation from each other, on different data, with different safety frameworks, could diverge in unpredictable ways. The companies building them are making enormous bets that their respective regulatory environments will remain stable enough to justify these valuations.

OpenAI’s $1.25 trillion valuation assumes the company can maintain its lead, convert research into durable products, and eventually generate returns that justify the price. DeepSeek’s $15 billion assumes it can compete without access to the best chips, the largest cloud platforms, or the global talent market that flows toward Silicon Valley.

One or both of these assumptions will be tested. The capital is real. The technology is real. What’s unclear is whether the world can sustain two completely separate AI development tracks without one falling behind or both fragmenting into incompatible ecosystems.

For now, investors on both sides are betting that their track is the one that matters. The numbers suggest they’re willing to pay almost anything to be right.