OpenAI has cut its fundraising target by $10 billion, the Financial Times reports

OpenAI has lowered the target of its current funding round by $10 billion, according to the Financial Times. The company now seeks about $20 billion at a valuation of $1.25 trillion, down from an earlier goal of $30 billion at $1.4 trillion, a $150 billion cut in the headline valuation.

Per the FT, some investors reduced the amounts they planned to contribute, citing people familiar with the matter. The deadline for binding commitments passed on Friday, and the first close could come in below the new $20 billion target. One backer told the paper the process began amid enthusiasm for AI stocks and was caught out by the market reversal. The largest participant is expected to be a UAE consortium that includes the state-backed fund MGX, and OpenAI would get an option to lease newly built computing capacity in the region. Founders Fund, Coatue, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and SoftBank are also expected to take part, with wealthy individuals possibly offered the same valuation afterward.

The backdrop is a rough day for tech. Reuters, as relayed by other outlets, reported the Nasdaq fell 2.9 percent on Friday, leaving it 7.8 percent below its record close. Trending Topics, citing the FT, says OpenAI's annualized revenue run rate was about $50 billion at the end of September, against $68 billion to $70 billion investors had been told earlier, mostly because of revenue through cloud partners that OpenAI does not fully book. The same report says the company expects to burn $278 billion in cash through 2030.

Timing also matters. Reports say OpenAI wanted commitments locked in before Anthropic's expected public listing, since both companies court the same large investors. Trending Topics adds that OpenAI shelved its own IPO for now. OpenAI, Sequoia, Founders Fund and SoftBank declined to comment to the FT.

For developers and AI builders, this is a signal about the cost of compute. OpenAI has ordered enormous capacity from partners such as Oracle, CoreWeave and Nvidia, and a smaller round raises questions about how smoothly that gets paid for. Nothing here says products or APIs change. Still, teams that build on one provider may want a fallback model and avoid long prepaid commitments.

Watch for the first close figure, any confirmation from OpenAI, and how Anthropic's listing is received. All of the numbers above rest on press reports citing unnamed sources, not on an OpenAI statement.

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