Is the AI "money-burning narrative" cooling down? OpenAI cuts its fundraising target by 10 billion!
The once widely acclaimed financing myth in the AI track is now facing its test.
According to multiple media reports, OpenAI has cut its new round of financing target to 200 billion US dollars.
This is a full 100 billion US dollars cut from the previous target of 300 billion US dollars.
The valuation has also been adjusted downwards from 1.4 trillion US dollars to 1.25 trillion US dollars, a shrinkage of 150 billion US dollars.
What is more noteworthy is that as of the commitment deadline on Friday, the actual investment commitments OpenAI received are only about 110 billion US dollars, less than half of the original 300 billion US dollar target.
Even measured against the adjusted 200 billion US dollar target, the market still predicts that it will be difficult to fully complete the first closing.
From 300 Billion to 200 Billion
The shrinkage of this round of financing did not happen overnight.
In mid-October, OpenAI was still pushing forward the plan of raising about 300 billion US dollars with a valuation of over 1.4 trillion US dollars.
Around October 22, the valuation asking price first dropped to 1.25 trillion US dollars; and this week, even the fundraising target itself was cut to 200 billion US dollars.
The timeline is so tight because competitor Anthropic's IPO is just around the corner.
Anthropic publicly released its listing documents this week, with a target valuation of at least 1.5 trillion US dollars, which may become one of the largest IPOs in history.
OpenAI originally wanted to lock in investor commitments before Anthropic goes public, to avoid being in a passive position when the two companies compete for the same pool of institutional capital.
However, judging from the actual subscription situation, this "head start" strategy has limited effect.
The time when OpenAI's financing cools down coincides exactly with the public market's concentrated clearing of AI expenditures.
This week, AI transactions have undergone drastic re-pricing, and AI-related stocks in the US stock market have plummeted.
The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index has fallen by more than 8% cumulatively this week; Intel plummeted 25% in a single day due to revenue guidance far below expectations, Micron fell 5.5%, and NVIDIA fell 4%; Alphabet posted its worst trading day in history on Thursday.
The core question raised by the market is very simple: Where is the return when large tech companies spend hundreds of billions of US dollars every year building data centers and competing for GPUs?
The previously announced capital expenditure data or forecasts from Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon are all lower than analysts' expectations.
When the giants that the market votes for with real money start to shrink their expenditure expectations, the prudence of the private market towards OpenAI is almost an inevitable transmission.
In addition, the deeper pressure comes from OpenAI's own expenditure commitments.
According to internal investor documents, OpenAI expects a cumulative free cash flow gap of about 278 billion US dollars from 2026 to 2030.
The nominal total amount of computing power and data center agreements signed in the past 15 months exceeds 1.4 trillion US dollars, which is about 35 times its current annualized revenue.
Where Will the Money Come From?
It is reported that the lead party of this round of financing is a United Arab Emirates consortium.
State-owned UAE technology funds such as MGX are the core contributing forces, and well-known venture capital firms including Founders Fund, Andreessen Horowitz, SoftBank, as well as high-net-worth individual investors also participate in this round.
As part of the transaction, OpenAI plans to lease additional computing power resources in the UAE region to support model training and business operations.
To fill the gap, OpenAI has also set its sights on more diversified sources of capital.
People familiar with the matter revealed that the company plans to expand the scope of fundraising in the next few weeks to include family offices and high-net-worth individual investors.
The success or failure of this round of financing will directly affect the IPO timeline.
However, the contraction of OpenAI's financing does not mean that the long-term logic of AI has completely collapsed.
What has changed is the market pricing ruler: in the past, capital was willing to pay for long-term stories, but now it is starting to demand to see implementable profit clues.
In the past two years, the valuation of the AI track has been rising all the way, and capital has poured frantically into the computing power and large model tracks.
Now the market has entered a verification period, and the fault tolerance space for high valuations is narrowing.
The final result of OpenAI's this round of financing will become a weather vane for observing the AI capital cycle.
If fundraising continues to fall short of expectations, the subsequent computing power procurement and capacity expansion pace of the entire AI industry chain may slow down.
For the entire industry, the frenzy period is over.
In the next stage, profitability and cash flow will be the top priorities that capital values.
This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Gelonghui Finance Hotspot" (ID: glh_finance), written by Lin Chunmu, published with authorization from 36Kr.