OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, reportedly may go public this year. Since launching the AI chatbot in November 2022, the San Francisco-based company has reached $20 billion in 2025 revenue. Despite huge losses, OpenAI is poised for one of the largest initial public offerings in history – expected to value the company as high as $1 trillion.
Should you invest in the OpenAI IPO? Here are some things to consider before making that decision.
OpenAI Key Stats to Know
OpenAI’s IPO is expected to be the second largest in history, looking at raising $60 billion or more, according to Reuters. Before that, however, SpaceX is expected to surpass Saudi Aramco’s $25.6 billion IPO in 2019 with a $75 billion raise.
OpenAI has grown significantly but loses huge amounts of money and is years away from profitability. In 2025, revenue grew 233% to $20 billion. However, due to the high cost of AI computing, OpenAI lost about $1.22 for every dollar of revenue it generated.
OpenAI is projected to lose $14 billion in 2026; through 2029, huge infrastructure investments are expected to yield cumulative losses of up to $115 billion with profitability arriving at some point in the 2030s.
OpenAI initially targeted roughly $30 billion in total revenue for 2026. However, internal reports from the first quarter indicate the company generated $5.7 billion – which if annualized would total $22.8 billion for 2026.
That loss of market share is slowing OpenAI’s growth rate. “OpenAI recently missed multiple internal revenue and user targets after facing ferocious competition from its two biggest rivals, Google and Anthropic,” reported the Wall Street Journal.
What is most important for investors to know is that the lead in AI can change quickly. A few years ago, Google’s AI chatbot was suggesting people to eat rocks and put glue on their pizza, noted my book Brain Rush.
Yet in the last year, Google has notably begun taking market share from ChatGPT. As the New York Times reported, Google has more than doubled the number of people using its chatbot to 900 million, roughly matching the number of ChatGPT users and far surpassing Anthropic’s estimated web traffic, noted the Times.
What’s more, Google is using AI to increase profit with online advertising, which could make its AI chatbots profitable even as Google’s Gemini is being adopted by Apple’s voice assistant Siri. What’s more, with Gemini already being used in Android phones, the partnership with Apple will make Gemini a part of most of the world’s smartphones, according to the Times.
I view this intense competition from a profitable rival to be a big risk for potential OpenAI investors.
When Could OpenAI Go Public?
While no official date has been set, OpenAI reportedly has been planning an IPO for the fourth quarter of 2026.
OpenAI has been working with bankers to prepare to file for an initial public offering. To that end, the ChatGPT purveyor has been working with bankers Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to draft an IPO prospectus and share it with regulators as soon as late of May, reported the Wall Street Journal.
However, there was reportedly different perspectives between Altman and chief financial officer Sarah Friar. As of early May, she was trying to push the IPO to 2027 due to the company’s spending commitments and its need to “meet the rigorous reporting standards required of public companies,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
What to Know Before OpenAI Goes Public
Read on for insights into OpenAI’s projected valuation, its shift from non- to for profit, what analysts are saying about the company’s potential and a summary of the key risks of buying into the IPO.
OpenAI’s Projected Valuation
OpenAI’s projected IPO valuation is very high. As of a March 2026 private funding round, the company was valued at $852 billion. The IPO could aim for a valuation as high as $1 trillion.
This is important for readers to know because they will need to assess whether the company’s stock is fairly valued in relation to its revenue and earnings.
Since the company is unlikely to generate profit for years, investors may wish to avoid purchasing shares if the valuation as a percent of sales is higher than peer companies growing at the same rate.
The Shift From Non-Profit to For-Profit
In 2019, OpenAI shifted from a nonprofit to a part nonprofit, part for-profit. The terms of that shift were subject of a trial pitting Elon Musk, an OpenAI co-founder, against Sam Altman, the company’s current CEO. The battle is over whether it was legal for OpenAI to shift from a non-profit to for-profit organization. The jury ruled unanimously against Musk, but Musk says he plans to file an appeal.
The transition happened in phases. In 2019, OpenAI created a “capped-profit” subsidiary. More recently, on October 28, 2025, the company finalized a major restructuring into a Delaware-based Public Benefit Corporation, allowing the original non-profit foundation to retain a 26% equity stake.
OpenAI made this transition because the company needed the money. Training frontier AI models requires billions of dollars to pay for computing power and talent. The restructuring was designed to attract large investments, such as the $13 billion from Microsoft about which I wrote in Brain Rush, compensate employees with traditional equity, and clear legal hurdles for a traditional IPO.
What Analysts Have Said About OpenAI’s Potential
Analysts view OpenAI as achieving the fastest revenue growth of any major technology company in history.
But there are also risks. In addition to competition from Google, another privately held rival, Anthropic, is growing very rapidly. With the company seeking a $900 billion valuation, the additional capital could help make Claude an even more formidable competitor.
Moreover, due to the high degree of hype surrounding AI and OpenAI’s seeming inability to make money, the price of a publicly-traded OpenAI is likely to be highly volatile, according to University of Florida IPO expert Jay Ritter.
Three Biggest Risks of Investing In OpenAI’s Potential IPO
The OpenAI IPO is likely to be a risky investment. In addition to the common risks of not knowing whether the company’s leadership will be able to boost the stock by exceeding investor expectations each quarter, the company faces several specific risks:
- Governance and corporate structure risk. The company has already experienced governance instability, including the temporary removal and reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman in 2023, as I wrote in Brain Rush. More recently, the New Yorker described the significant level of distrust of Altman from people who have worked with him.
- Dependence on Microsoft. Any deterioration in the Microsoft partnership – built off an initial investment of $13 billion by the software giant – could make it more difficult for OpenAI to access compute power, financing and enterprise distribution, according to Windows Central.
- Key personnel departures and talent drain. OpenAI has experienced executive turnover, including losing roughly half of its AI safety researchers in 2024 and the recent exits of key figures like Kevin Weil. Continued internal friction or the loss of talented researchers to rivals directly threatens OpenAI’s ability to develop better AI models.
How to Buy Into OpenAI Stock After The IPO
Once the company goes public, investors will have the option of purchasing shares through their broker. Here’s how:
- Open a brokerage account. Sign up with a mainstream online trading platform like Fidelity, Charles Schwab or Robinhood.
- Transfer cash. Transfer money from your bank into the brokerage account so you have funds ready to invest.
- Place a buy order. On the day OpenAI goes public, log in, search for its newly announced stock ticker symbol, and submit a “buy” order for the number of shares you want.
Doing this may not be enough for you to buy shares at the IPO. That’s because getting access to shares at the initial pre-market IPO price is difficult for everyday investors. Those shares often go to favored clients of the investment banks running the IPO process.
Hence, you may have better luck seeking to get indirect exposure by investing in publicly traded companies such as Microsoft that already have major partnerships with OpenAI.
The OpenAI IPO is likely to be among history’s largest and it will garner an outsized share of media attention. Since the company is facing competition, loses enormous amounts of money, and has significant financial obligations; the risks of buying the stock immediately after it goes public are quite high.
However, if the company is able to exceed quarterly expectations for revenue and profit growth for years into the future, IPO investors are likely to be richly rewarded.
