Labs

OpenAI weighs 2027
IPO delay as
Altman holds line
on $1 trillion

The New York Times reported June 26 that the ChatGPT maker may push its public debut into 2027 rather than price below a trillion-dollar mark. SoftBank shares fell the most since August 2024 and chip names slid in response.

By Casey Vanderhoof Frontier labs correspondent · June 26, 2026

OpenAI is leaning toward pushing its public debut into 2027 rather than pricing the company below a trillion dollars, according to a New York Times report Friday citing three people involved in the deliberations. Sam Altman, by this account, would rather keep the company private than accept a tape that doesn’t validate the number he’s been telling investors, partners, and the broader AI capex complex to assume.

The market read the signal immediately. SoftBank Group, whose stake in OpenAI is slated to stand at roughly $65 billion by October, fell the most since August 2024. That’s not a small reference point: only last month its market cap surpassed Toyota’s, a milestone built almost entirely on the assumption that the OpenAI position would be marked, monetized, and validated on a public tape. Nvidia slid about 1.5%, and Broadcom and AMD followed the chip complex lower.

The arithmetic behind the AI trade has been running on commitments only a public OpenAI can plausibly fund. A 10-gigawatt Nvidia deployment. A separate 6-gigawatt agreement with AMD. Roughly $300 billion in Oracle cloud capacity. Each of those numbers implicitly assumes the company reaches public markets at a valuation that justifies the off-take. A delay doesn’t unwind the commitments, but it does extend the window in which everyone holds the bag privately.

OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 with the SEC on June 8. Anthropic filed at the start of the month. At the time of its filing OpenAI told reporters that “there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company,” which now reads less as boilerplate and more as a hedge against exactly this scenario.

Prediction markets are arbitraging the ambiguity in real time. Kalshi contracts give a 59% probability that OpenAI officially announces an IPO by March 1, 2027, climbing to 73% by June 2027, with only about a one-in-three chance of an announcement before January 1.

Elsewhere on the IPO tape, Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which had rallied nearly 60% above its offer price to a post-IPO high of $202 on June 16, traded at $151.05 in Friday’s premarket. The AI-adjacent listings that did go public are now giving back gains while the marquee name keeps the queue waiting.

The structural read is straightforward. Altman has converted a valuation target into a credibility commitment, and the entire AI capex chain (chips, cloud, Japanese balance sheets) is now collateral on that promise. A 2027 timeline buys time for the number to grow into itself. It also extends the period during which every counterparty has to keep believing.

Sources