IPO

A company founded five years ago by researchers who thought AI safety deserved more attention is now worth more than Switzerland’s GDP. Anthropic is closing a $50 billion funding round at roughly $900 billion. If that lands, the Claude maker officially leapfrogs OpenAI — the very company its founders left behind — to become the most valuable AI startup on Earth. Welcome to 2026, where turning away billion-dollar checks is a flex. ...

AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems just filed to go public on Nasdaq under ticker “CBRS.” The headline numbers look incredible: $510 million in revenue, a swing from a $485 million net loss to $87.9 million in net income, and $24.6 billion in remaining performance obligations. But buried in the S-1 is a financial arrangement so tangled it deserves far more scrutiny than it’s getting. OpenAI isn’t just Cerebras’s biggest customer. It’s also an investor, a lender, and the single reason this IPO is happening at all. ...

There’s something deeply uncomfortable about the timing. OpenAI is barreling toward what could be the most anticipated tech IPO in a decade — a valuation north of $1 trillion, 900 million weekly users, the kind of numbers that make Wall Street salivate. And right in the middle of that momentum, Florida’s attorney general just dropped a bomb. On April 9th, Florida AG James Uthmeier announced a formal investigation into OpenAI and ChatGPT, citing concerns about child safety, national security, and the chatbot’s alleged role in a mass shooting at Florida State University. Subpoenas are coming. The stakes couldn’t be higher. ...

A company that didn’t exist a decade ago is now worth more than JPMorgan Chase, Visa, or Samsung. And it’s not even public yet. OpenAI just closed $122 billion in a single funding round, locked in an $852 billion valuation, and casually dropped that it’s pulling in $2 billion per month in revenue. If you needed proof that the AI era’s economic engine is real — not just vibes and venture capital fairy dust — this is it. ...

When OpenAI launched Sora to the public in late 2025, it felt like the future had arrived. Type a prompt, get a cinematic video. Disney signed a $1 billion partnership to let users create videos with Marvel and Star Wars characters. The hype machine was running full throttle. Six months later, Sora is dead. And its demise tells us more about the real economics of AI than any earnings call ever could. ...

When Masayoshi Son makes a bet, he doesn’t do it quietly. The SoftBank founder swings for the fences — sometimes spectacularly (early Alibaba), sometimes painfully (WeWork). His latest move might be the most audacious yet: a $40 billion unsecured bridge loan, announced March 27, primarily to fund SoftBank’s massive stake in OpenAI. Forty billion dollars. Unsecured. Twelve-month repayment window. This isn’t corporate financing. It’s a signal flare. The Loan SoftBank secured the loan through JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and four major Japanese banks — Mizuho, SMBC, and MUFG among them. No specific assets pledged as collateral. Matures March 2027. ...

The AI industry just stopped pretending it’s a technology revolution and started acting like a Wall Street dealmaking frenzy. Reuters broke the news on March 23: OpenAI is offering private equity firms preferred equity stakes with a guaranteed minimum return of 17.5% to lure them into joint ventures focused on enterprise AI deployment. The company behind ChatGPT is essentially paying buyout firms to help it sell AI to their portfolio companies — because rival Anthropic is running the same playbook. ...