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OpenAI's $1.2 trillion round asks $348 billion more than its March price
The Wall Street Journal reports OpenAI raising at $1.2 trillion, up from $852 billion in March, and the memory shortage that money is meant to buy through is drawing SK Hynix toward Intel's planned Ohio fab.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- OpenAI is planning a funding round that would value it at $1.2 trillion, according to The Wall Street Journal, after a March raise that priced the company at $852 billion.
- Wall Street initially expected OpenAI to list this year, and the company has since moved its IPO to 2027.
- Anthropic, which last raised in May at a valuation of $965 billion, is largely expected to file its S-1 paperwork this fall.
- SK Hynix issued a statement on Wednesday responding to a Reuters report that it wants to make memory chips in the United States for the first time, at Intel's planned Ohio fabrication plant.
- The AI buildout has created a memory chip shortage that has pushed prices up for data centre builders and consumer electronics manufacturers alike.
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Why it matters
- constraint Standing up fabs takes time, so capital raised now buys memory at shortage prices for the whole period Ohio is under construction; the announcement does not change global supply.
- decision The reported structure puts cloud buyers alongside Intel and SK Hynix in the venture. The go-ahead on Ohio capacity moves out of Intel's hands alone.
- contradiction Altman endorsed Amodei's call to slow frontier development in the same week as the report of a higher-priced round, while Huang says the doomsday fears are made up; an underwriter has to pick which one to price.
- exposure With most of the ten largest PFAS producers planning to raise output for AI demand, the chemical cost of the buildout sits with permitting authorities and residents.
The step from $852 billion in March to a reported $1.2 trillion is $348 billion of new price agreed in a private round, roughly 41% above the March mark [18]. Anthropic's May mark of $965 billion sat $113 billion above OpenAI's March price, and the reported new number puts OpenAI about 24% above Anthropic [19][20].
The Ohio report moved equities the same day. Intel and SK Hynix each rose more than 3%, on a morning when the Nasdaq was up 0.5% in pre-market trading [4][1]. SK Hynix's public position on the plan is a single phrase: the company said it is "exploring various options" [2].
SK Hynix has yet to say how big the venture is, how the capital splits or when production starts, and the terms of the OpenAI round remain unpublished [23]. Any claim about what these two bets do to the sector's cost of capital is guesswork at this stage. In my view the round and the venture are one transaction seen from both ends, with money raised at the top of the stack and spent on the part of it that is short [12]. The competing reading is that $1.2 trillion is an insider mark set ahead of a 2027 listing [7], in which case the memory bottleneck belongs to whoever signs the supply contracts and not to the equity. The first reading fails if the round closes with no contracted capacity or supply commitments attached to it.
The monetisation arriving alongside all this is priced in single digits. Meta One starts at $2.99 a month for a single product, $7.99 for an individual bundle and $14.99 for creator and business bundles [17], which annualise to $35.88, $95.88 and $179.88 [21].
Part of the buildout's cost is being booked by other companies entirely. Arkema reported plans for a Kentucky production unit to "enable us to follow the rapid expansion of datacenters' cooling needs", and Solstice told investors that AI demand was a "generational opportunity" for growth [15][22]. "These companies' expansion plans show that unless governments and regulators insist on a rapid phaseout, we will face a new tidal wave of forever chemicals," ChemSec's executive director, Anne-Sofie Backar, told the Guardian [16].
What to watch
- Whether SK Hynix confirms the Intel venture with a disclosed capital commitment, named cloud partners and a production date.
- Anthropic's S-1, which would give the first audited financials for a frontier lab and a public comparable for OpenAI's private mark.
- Whether the OpenAI round closes at $1.2 trillion or below, and what supply or capacity commitments come with it.