Sam Altman at BlackRock Infrastructure Summit Held In Washington, DC

(Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

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OpenAI is now valued at $852 billion — that’s about 5 Disneys

The company just closed out the biggest funding round in Silicon Valley history, raising $122 billion.

4/1/26 6:22AM

Imagine what it could have been worth if it hadn’t shut down Sora!

OpenAI, the behemoth behind ChatGPT and still very much the cash-burning mass at the center of the AI universe, just closed out the biggest funding round in Silicon Valley history, raising a total of $122 billion and taking its current valuation to a genuinely staggering $852 billion.

The vast majority of the latest round comes from just three companies: Nvidia and SoftBank stumped up $30 billion apiece, while Amazon chipped in (a very much conditional) $50 billion — with the remainder made up of smaller sums from Andreessen Horowitz, MGX, and a host of other investors, per Bloomberg reporting.

Sam Altman’s company is now expected to IPO before the end of the year, according to reports, and the latest raise puts it well ahead of competitor Anthropic, which makes the Claude suite of products and raised a somewhat paltry by comparison $30 billion last month at a $380 billion valuation.

With its new jaw-dropping valuation, OpenAI is also now worth a great deal more than some of the biggest names in US business history.

OpenAI 2026 valuation chart — Sherwood News

All told, the AI giant is now valued at roughly the same as McDonald’s ($222 billion), Disney ($171 billion), Boeing ($156 billion), Uber ($148 billion), Comcast ($105 billion), and Ford ($46 billion)... combined.

Considering the insane deals the company has struck as of late, it shouldn’t find it too difficult to part ways with its newly raised capital.

Jon Keegan4h

FT: Meta considering “tens of billions” in new capital to fund AI

Just days after Google announced a monster $85 billion upsized equity raise, the extremely profitable Meta is seeking to sell “tens of billions of dollars” in stock, according to a new report from the Financial Times.

Meta is planning on spending between $125 billion and $145 billion on AI capital expenditure this year alone.

Shares dropped more than 5% on the news.

Meta weighs big equity raising after blockbuster Google deal

Rani Molla

Meta is supercharging its subscription businesses

The free-app giant never really cared about recurring revenue. Now, it’s launching paid plans for all sorts of stuff.

Jon Keegan9h

FT: Anthropic staff helping the NSA use Mythos for offensive cyberattacks

Anthropic’s Mythos AI model was deemed too dangerous to release to the public, with the company citing its ability to orchestrate novel cyberattacks.

And that’s just what the National Security Agency is doing, with the help of Anthropic staff embedded at the agency, according to a report from the Financial Times.

Only a small number of companies and US allies have been given access to the advanced model, which means America’s adversaries have not had the chance to shore up their defenses against the AI model’s new offensive capabilities.

The arrangement is especially unusual as the Pentagon has deemed Anthropic’s AI a national security supply chain risk — effectively blacklisting it for defense work — in response to the company’s refusal to allow its technology to be used for any legal application, which could include autonomous killing or mass surveillance. Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the determination.

US National Security Agency using Anthropic’s Mythos for cyber attacks

Rani Molla10h

Longtime Tesla bear JPMorgan upgraded Tesla and raised its price target to $475 from $145

For more than a decade, JPMorgan was Wall Street’s most stubborn Tesla skeptic, anchored by auto analyst Ryan Brinkman’s strict focus on traditional car fundamentals and near-term delivery numbers.

But JPM recently handed coverage of the stock to a new analyst, Rajat Gupta, who is throwing that playbook out the window. In a note Friday, the firm upgraded Tesla to “neutral” from “underweight” and raised its price target 228% to $475 from $145. (The analyst consensus on FactSet is $403.) Instead of focusing on the company’s struggling vehicle business, the new analyst is orienting himself more toward Tesla’s idea of the future, now modeling Tesla’s physical AI and robotaxi fleets all the way out to the year 2040.

Here are the main reasons for the capitulation:

Looking past the car lot: Gupta argues that Tesla “is at the forefront of physical AI, entering uncharted TAMs” and therefore “deserves the benefit of the doubt to be valued on LT earnings potential” rather than near-term speed bumps.
Unmatched vertical integration: Tesla’s control over everything from battery cells to custom silicon gives it a massive moat. JPM notes this starting point advantage is “unmatched at an industrial level scale” and “still somewhat under-appreciated and misunderstood.”
The AWS flywheel effect: Deploying Optimus robots inside its own factories “should not only lower COGS for the base automotive business, but more importantly, help validate the product at an industrial scale.” Gupta called it “a classic flywheel effect, somewhat analogous to AWS and Kiva at AMZN.”

For Tesla bulls who have argued for years that this is an AI company and not a carmaker, JPM’s sudden $3.9 trillion valuation model is the ultimate validation.

Anthropic ponders self-improving AI

Anthropic says Claude already writes 80% of its code. A new post asks what happens when the models can improve themselves — and whether anyone could stop them.

Jon Keegan10h