OpenAI Is Now Worth More Than Ford, GM and Boeing Combined — And a $1 Trillion IPO Could Be Next
In the annals of American corporate history, the distance between zero and $25 billion in annual revenue has never been traveled this quickly.
Salesforce took approximately 18 years to reach $25 billion in annual revenue. Google took about 17. Facebook took about 12. OpenAI reached the same milestone in roughly 39 months.
OpenAI crossed $25 billion in annualized revenue as of late February 2026 — a milestone that highlights the rapid enterprise adoption of artificial intelligence and the intensifying competition across the sector. The figure represents a projected yearly revenue based on current performance — and it has set Wall Street on fire with speculation about what comes next: a public offering that some analysts believe could be valued at up to $1 trillion.
If that number holds, it would be the largest IPO in the history of global capital markets — surpassing Saudi Aramco and Alibaba combined.
But behind the staggering topline growth lies a far more complex financial picture — one that every investor, every ChatGPT user, and every enterprise technology buyer needs to understand before the listing bell rings.
The Revenue Story
OpenAI reached $25 billion in annualized revenue at the end of February 2026 — growing 17% in just two months from the $21.4 billion it was generating at year-end 2025.
To appreciate just how extraordinary that trajectory is, consider the starting point. OpenAI’s annualized revenue crossed the $20 billion mark in 2025, marking a 233% increase from the previous year — itself a significant acceleration from growth that saw revenue rise from $2 billion in 2023 to $6 billion in 2024.
The engine driving that growth is no longer just individual consumers paying $20 a month for ChatGPT Plus. ChatGPT now serves more than 900 million weekly active users — a figure that ranks it among the most widely used software products on earth. Paying business users surpassed 9 million as of February 2026, up from 5 million just six months earlier.
OpenAI’s enterprise business now generates $10 billion out of a total annualized revenue of $25 billion — the number the company is racing to grow as it positions itself for public markets. To accelerate that push, OpenAI has partnered with four of the world’s largest consulting firms, betting that a more hands-on approach will help corporate clients move beyond pilot projects to full-scale AI deployments.
The IPO: $1 Trillion or Bust
OpenAI could debut on the public markets as soon as the fourth quarter of this year. The company has hired Cynthia Gaylor, former CFO of DocuSign, as its first head of investor relations to sharpen its messaging and governance ahead of the listing. Internal targets discussed include a filing in the second half of 2026 and a listing shortly thereafter, with the company potentially valued at up to $1 trillion.
The company has selected law firms Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz to lead preparations, according to people familiar with the matter.
At $1 trillion, the implied valuation multiples are approximately 38 times projected 2026 revenue, 5 times projected 2030 revenue, and 17 to 18 times projected 2030 operating income. Those multiples are aggressive by conventional software metrics and potentially defensible for a company growing at triple-digit rates in a winner-take-most market — provided revenue projections materialize and margins recover as predicted.
The IPO also carries a contractual urgency that investors should note. Amazon’s $50 billion investment commitment — of which only $15 billion is upfront — has a remaining $35 billion contingent on OpenAI either achieving artificial general intelligence or completing an IPO. That contractual structure directly accelerates the public market timeline regardless of the company’s internal preferences.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has stated that the chipmaker’s $30 billion investment in OpenAI may be the last private infusion before the IPO later this year.
The Problem: Burning $57 Billion a Year
Here is where the story gets complicated for investors and analysts alike.
Despite record revenues, OpenAI remains deeply unprofitable. The company is not expected to break even until 2030 — and its cash burn trajectory is equally daunting, with annual losses projected to reach $57 billion by 2027.
The scale of infrastructure investment driving that burn is almost difficult to comprehend. OpenAI is targeting roughly $600 billion in total compute spending through 2030, projecting total revenue of more than $280 billion by the same year. The flagship Stargate site in Abilene, Texas — co-owned by Crusoe and Oracle — delivers racks of Nvidia GB200 GPUs, with five additional U.S. Stargate data center sites announced, bringing the initiative to nearly 7 gigawatts of capacity and over $400 billion in investment across approximately three years.
For context: $600 billion in compute spending is more than the annual GDP of Sweden. OpenAI must generate revenue at a historically unprecedented scale just to stay solvent — let alone profitable. The clock is ticking, and Wall Street knows it.
The Race Against Anthropic
OpenAI’s path to public markets is complicated by a rival that is closing the gap faster than many analysts predicted.
Anthropic has surged to nearly $19 billion in annualized revenue, with its Claude Code product alone generating $2.5 billion annually — a figure that signals just how swiftly the AI sector has monetized at scale.
The competitive divergence that matters most for investors, however, is not revenue — it is the path to profitability. Anthropic is targeting breakeven as early as 2028 — two years ahead of OpenAI. That differential creates a meaningful fundraising advantage for Anthropic, as investors backing a company two years closer to breakeven face substantially less dilution risk.
Anthropic is also widely regarded as ahead in enterprise adoption despite being the smaller company — a dynamic that adds meaningful pressure to OpenAI’s push to dominate the corporate market before its IPO window closes.
For a deeper look at how these two companies compare, see IBTimes’ full breakdown: Anthropic vs. OpenAI — The AI Battle That Will Define the Decade.
The Focus Problem — and a Remarkable Admission
Inside OpenAI, the path to Wall Street has required an uncomfortable reckoning.
The company had spread itself thin — pursuing Sora, a web browser called Atlas, a hardware device, and a TikTok-for-AI concept — all announced with the same urgency, a different product each time. Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, told staff they had to stop being distracted by what she called “side quests” — a remarkable admission from a company nominally valued at $840 billion.
The new mandate is sharply focused. Simo told employees: “Our opportunity now is to take those 900 million users and turn them into high-compute users. We’ll do that by transforming ChatGPT into a productivity tool.” OpenAI is now cutting side projects and redirecting resources toward coding and enterprise — the two categories most likely to move the needle before the IPO filing.
For Wall Street, the message is clear: the company that changed the world with ChatGPT is now trying to prove it can run like a business — not just a research lab with a revenue line attached.
What the IPO Means for ChatGPT Users
The consequences of a public listing will not be limited to investors. For the hundreds of millions of people who use ChatGPT daily, the pressure of quarterly earnings reports will be felt directly.
Advertising began appearing for free and entry-tier users in January 2026, with projections showing ad revenue scaling from $1 billion in 2026 to $25 billion by 2029. Premium subscription tiers will almost certainly expand as public market pressure to demonstrate a path to profitability intensifies.
OpenAI has already rolled out higher-priced tiers including ChatGPT Pro at $200 per month for power users, ChatGPT Team at approximately $25 to $30 per user per month for small businesses, and ChatGPT Enterprise at custom pricing for large organizations. More than one million organizations now use OpenAI’s technology.
The inclusion of new spreadsheet and presentation tools in ChatGPT Plus and Enterprise puts OpenAI on a direct collision course with Microsoft — its largest corporate backer and, increasingly, one of its most formidable rivals — and Google, whose Gemini platform is aggressively competing for the same enterprise budgets.
The Funding That Got It Here
The capital formation behind OpenAI’s rise is itself a story without modern precedent.
In February 2026, global startup funding hit $189 billion in a single month — with OpenAI leading the charge with a $110 billion raise, Anthropic close behind at $30 billion, and Alphabet’s Waymo at $16 billion. Together, those three deals accounted for 83% of all venture capital deployed that month.
OpenAI raised that $110 billion at a pre-money valuation of approximately $730 billion — with internal projections suggesting the company is targeting up to $1 trillion at IPO. That would be the largest public offering in history, surpassing Saudi Aramco’s $25.6 billion raise in 2019 and Alibaba’s $26 billion in 2014 — by an order of magnitude.
Key backers include SoftBank, Amazon, and Nvidia — three companies with deeply vested interests in ensuring OpenAI not only survives but dominates the next decade of artificial intelligence.
What Investors Need to Watch
For anyone considering exposure to OpenAI — directly at IPO or through its ecosystem of partners — several critical factors will determine whether the $1 trillion valuation holds:
Gross margin recovery: Current gross margins sit at approximately 33%. For the $1 trillion valuation to be credible, gross margins need to recover toward 52 to 67% — a trajectory that depends heavily on compute costs declining as Stargate infrastructure comes fully online.
Revenue trajectory: The valuation requires revenue to reach $62 billion in 2027 — more than doubling from current levels in under two years.
Enterprise competition: OpenAI’s $10 billion enterprise business must scale significantly while fending off Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic — all of whom are pursuing the same Fortune 500 budgets with well-funded, mature product lines.
The IPO window: CoreWeave, which went public in early 2026 at a $23 billion valuation and roughly tripled from there, demonstrated that AI infrastructure companies can attract premium public market valuations. OpenAI is betting the same logic applies at forty times the scale.
The Bottom Line
Sam Altman has spent three years telling anyone who would listen that OpenAI is building something the world has never seen before. The revenue numbers are starting to make that case for him.
Twenty-five billion dollars in annualized sales is not a projection or a pitch deck promise. It is a run rate that arrived faster than Google, faster than Salesforce, faster than any software company in the recorded history of American enterprise. The market has noticed. So has every venture capitalist, sovereign wealth fund, and retail investor who missed the last great technology listing.
But a $1 trillion valuation is not a reward for what OpenAI has already built. It is a bet on what it builds next — and on whether the company can bend its cost structure toward profitability before the patience of its backers runs thin.
The math is unforgiving. Revenue must more than double in under two years. Gross margins must nearly double from where they sit today. A cash burn rate that could reach $57 billion annually must be brought to heel — all while Google, Microsoft, and Anthropic spend every available dollar trying to make sure OpenAI’s enterprise customers become their enterprise customers instead.
None of that makes the IPO unlikely. If anything, the contractual obligations embedded in OpenAI’s funding agreements — from Amazon’s $35 billion contingency to Nvidia’s $30 billion commitment — mean the listing will happen whether the timing is ideal or not.
What remains genuinely uncertain is the price at which Wall Street decides the story is worth owning. At $1 trillion, investors are not buying a software company. They are buying a declaration that artificial intelligence is the most consequential technology since electricity — and that OpenAI will be the company that captures the most value from it.
That may yet prove to be exactly right. It is also, by any conventional financial measure, the most expensive bet in the history of the public markets.
OpenAI has not confirmed an official IPO timeline. All revenue figures are annualized run-rate estimates based on industry reporting and have not been independently verified by IBTimes.
