OpenAi, placement ready for the fourth quarter

OpenAi is poised for an IPO in the fourth quarter of the year. The colossal artificial intelligence start-up, valued at least half a billion dollars today, is discussing a Wall Street landing sometime between October and December with banks, the Wall Street Journal revealed. A sign of the acceleration of preparations is the strengthening of its finance team: it has hired two top executives, an accounting manager, Ajmere Dale, and an executive in charge of corporate business finance and investor relations, Cynthia Gaylor.

CEO Sam Altman's goal would be to beat rival Anthropic, led by Dario Amodei and born of OpenAi dissidents, to the punch. It is itself on the verge of a large placement if possible by the end of the year, which it would discuss with a range of investors. With this in mind, Anthropic has also recently made new hires in financial positions: from Andrew Zoto, head of capital markets, to Kevin Chang, taken from Blackstone. Whoever arrives first will be able to boast the title of the first generative Ai company to appear on the stock exchange, with a consequent advantage in attracting attention and shareholders.

OpenAi is engaged at this stage in a further colossal capital-raising round, with a target of USD 100 billion, valuing the group at up to USD 830 billion, designed as a springboard to an IPO. Participants in the round could include Softbank with 30 billion and Amazon with up to 50 billion. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is personally negotiating with Altman to complete the financing, the Journal reported. The run-up in the valuations of the artificial intelligence leaders contrasts with their continued heavy losses, but so far these have not dampened investor fever.

Other record-breaking IPOs are also in sight this year: above all Elon Musk's Space X in the summer, with the declared intention of raking in perhaps a trillion. However, according to rumours, Musk is also considering a merger of the space giant with the rest of his empire, with his own xAi or with the already listed Tesla in crisis (the last quarterly accounts have suffered), now increasingly focused on artificial intelligence and hi-tech. Musk also has an open legal case against OpenAi for damages in which he is asking for 134 billion.