OpenAI is exploring a massive new funding round that could value the artificial intelligence company around $30 billion, according to a person familiar with the talks who spoke to CNBC on September 29, 2026. The discussions follow the conclusion of OpenAI’s annual DevDay keynote in San Francisco, where Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman unveiled more than 20 new products, developer tools, and enterprise privacy features.
OpenAI Evaluates New Funding and Prepares for Public Markets
OpenAI is engaging in early-stage discussions with investors regarding a potential new funding round, as confirmed by CNBC. While the final figure could shift based on demand, the company could raise approximately $30 billion according to an anonymous source close to the negotiations. Bloomberg first reported the potential fundraising effort. The talks are entirely investor-driven, and no official term sheets have been finalized yet.
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This potential capital raise follows OpenAI’s historic $122 billion funding round earlier this year in March, which closed at an $852 billion valuation. In the weeks leading up to DevDay, multiple investors approached the firm with fresh proposals to initiate another round. Meanwhile, the organization is actively preparing for a major initial public offering widely anticipated for next year, having confidentially filed its prospectus with regulators in June.
DevDay 2026 Keynote Introduces Plugin Extensions and Private Intelligence
During the DevDay keynote on September 29, 2026, Altman addressed roughly 2,500 attendees, emphasizing the company’s focus on user empowerment. Altman stated that AI should give people more tools to create, learn, discover, and expand knowledge.
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To support this vision, OpenAI launched plugin extensions. These tools allow developers to build entire applications that function natively within ChatGPT and Codex. Altman demonstrated a meetings app built with the feature, showing how users can view upcoming schedules directly inside the chatbot workspace. The company also previewed OpenAI Private Intelligence, a feature designed to give enterprise users stronger data controls. Altman explained that Zero Data Retention with private safety processing delivers frontier model safety without storing content on servers, while private inference maintains privacy during query execution. OpenAI designed these systems in collaboration with enterprise partners including Cisco, Databricks, and Snowflake.
New Pro Tier, Ultrafast Speed, and GPT-6.1 Sol Model
OpenAI expanded its product lineup with a new Pro tier dubbed Pro 500. This subscription tier supports the company’s highest usage allowance and grants access to Ultrafast, a new premium speed tier available across ChatGPT, the Codex coding assistant, and the company’s application programming interface. According to OpenAI, Ultrafast generates tokens up to eight times faster in Codex and up to six times faster in the API.
The hardware and performance announcements accompanied the introduction of a new AI model, GPT-6.1 Sol. Released just one week after its predecessor, GPT-6 Sol, the company labels the new model a major upgrade capable of handling professional workloads, computer use, and agentic coding. The release follows OpenAI’s announcement on September 28 that it pulled plans to launch another model, GPT-6.1 Astra, because it failed to meet internal safety standards. For workplace collaboration, the company also introduced ChatGPT Space, allowing human teammates and AI agents to work together without interruption.
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