AI Money This Week: OpenAI’s $150B Valuation Cut

OpenAI’s next round is priced $150 billion below its September pitch: up to $30 billion at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, CNBC reported. Tenstorrent raised $1.5 billion at $6.2 billion, the week’s biggest announced AI round. Anthropic may sign a second roughly $45 billion compute deal with Nscale, and Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for $5.66 billion.

Key takeaways

• Private AI prices are being negotiated down at the very top: OpenAI’s new mark is about 25 times its roughly $50 billion net annualized revenue, and nothing is signed yet.
• Startup money kept flowing below the top: the AI Funding Tracker added seven rounds of $100 million or more, worth $3.9 billion, taking 2026 to $342.4 billion.
• Stocks now pay only 0.39 points more than 10-year Treasurys in earnings yield, ahead of a Fed meeting and Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon earnings next week.

The week in numbers

Number	What it is	Story
$1.25T	OpenAI’s reported pre-money valuation for a round of up to $30 billion	OpenAI valuation cut
~$90B	Anthropic’s Nscale commitments if a second ~$45 billion contract is signed	Nscale Anthropic deal
$6.2B	Tenstorrent’s post-money valuation after a $1.5 billion Series E	Tenstorrent funding
58%	Premium Salesforce is paying for Braze, at $47.50 a share in cash	Salesforce Braze acquisition
$4,999	Starting price of Nvidia’s DGX Spark 64GB, $1,000 above the original’s launch price	DGX Spark 64GB
0.39	Points by which the S&P 500’s earnings yield beat the 10-year Treasury on Oct. 22	Equity risk premium
$50	Estimated token cost per successful break-in in the Cairn AI agent campaign	Cairn AI agent hack

AI deals and funding

OpenAI’s price comes down. OpenAI is negotiating up to $30 billion at $1.25 trillion pre-money, about $1.28 trillion after the money, with Coatue and UAE investors leading, CNBC reported on October 22. That is $150 billion below the $1.4 trillion pitched weeks earlier, though still about 1.5 times March’s $852 billion mark. OpenAI reportedly wants commitments signed by around October 30. Read more

Anthropic and Nscale talk about a second building. Bloomberg reported that the two are negotiating a roughly $45 billion contract for a second 460-megawatt building at Nscale’s Monarch campus in West Virginia, on top of the August agreements worth up to about $44.6 billion. Only about $2.6 billion of Nscale’s $103.4 billion contract book is active, and some investors want an IPO valuation of $16 billion to $19 billion against the roughly $30 billion Nscale is seeking. Read more

Tenstorrent more than doubles its price. Jim Keller’s RISC-V AI chip startup raised a $1.5 billion Series E at $6.2 billion post-money, led by Trace Capital and Innovation X, with ARK Invest, Sandisk, Morgan Stanley and T. Rowe Price joining. That is 2.4 times its 2024 valuation, after Qualcomm and Intel were reported to have circled the company. Read more

Salesforce pays up for Braze. Salesforce will pay $47.50 a share in cash for the customer-engagement platform, about $5.66 billion in enterprise value and a 58% premium to Braze’s October 19 close. The price is about 6.2 times Braze’s fiscal 2027 revenue guidance, and Salesforce would owe a $300 million break fee if the deal fails. Read more

Texas sues OpenAI and Sam Altman. A 67-page complaint filed October 23 seeks up to $10,000 per violation, up to $250,000 more where consumers 65 or older were targeted, a ban on minors using ChatGPT and a court-appointed evaluator to approve each new model. Texas is at least the 10th state to sue OpenAI over ChatGPT safety this year. Read more

Launches that moved money

Kimi K3.1 Pro undercuts the leaders. Moonshot AI’s new model lists at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, half of Claude Opus 5.5’s price, and scores 65.7% on Terminal-Bench 4.0, 0.7 points behind Opus 5.5 on Moonshot’s own numbers. The open weights are slated for release by November 4. Read more

OpenAI’s models arrive on Google Cloud. GPT-6 Astra, GPT-6.1 Sol and GPT-6 Luna entered private preview in Google Cloud’s Model Garden on October 21, with no Google Cloud price disclosed. On OpenAI’s own API, Astra input costs $10 per million tokens and Luna $0.10. Read more

Mercury 3 sells speed. Inception’s diffusion model claims about 1,068 tokens per second with a 1 million-token context window. Its $0.20 list price for input is double GPT-6 Luna’s once a 50% launch discount ends, and the end date has not been announced. Read more

Memory costs hit Nvidia’s desktop box. The DGX Spark 64GB went on sale October 23 at $4,999, with half the memory of the original, which launched at $3,999 and now lists at $6,950. That works out to about $78 per gigabyte of memory, roughly 2.5 times the launch-era rate. Read more

AI agents get cheap to misuse. NorForge said one operator’s agents on the open-source Cairn platform tried more than 1,200 websites and breached over 100, at an estimated $50 in tokens per successful hack. Separately, OpenCode said stored provider keys of about 1.4% of its Console users were exposed, and some users report unauthorized charges. Read more and the OpenCode breach

Investing: what changed this week

The stock premium nearly vanished. On October 22 the S&P 500’s forward earnings yield of 5.35% topped the 4.96% 10-year Treasury yield by just 0.39 points. A 10% cut to earnings estimates, with prices unchanged, would push the earnings yield below the bond yield. Read more

Tower stocks jumped on SpaceX. Crown Castle closed up 9.10% at $86.00 on October 23 after Bloomberg reported SpaceX is seeking at least 80,000 US cell sites. Crown Castle yields 4.94% but trades at 18.7 times AFFO; SBA Communications is cheaper at 15.2 times with a 41% payout. Read more

Mortgage bonds pay more, with a catch. iShares’ MBB yielded 5.80% to maturity against 5.10% for IEF as of October 19, but its SEC yield is lower, so the headline gap overstates the income gain. Read more

Bitcoin downside protection has a price. A buffer ETF caps losses near 10%, but CBXJ charges 0.69% a year against IBIT’s 0.25% and capped its 2026 gain at 22.24%. Read more

Steel: debt versus discipline. After October 19 earnings, Cleveland-Cliffs trades near 6.4 times EBITDA with leverage of 3.1 times, while Steel Dynamics costs 8.1 times with net debt under one times. Read more

AI Funding Tracker update

We added seven rounds of $100 million or more this week, worth $3.9 billion: Tenstorrent ($1.5 billion), Flapping Airplanes ($1 billion), Legora ($550 million), ASI ($325 million), Pathos AI ($237 million), Arda ($160 million) and Eka Robotics ($150 million). The AI Funding Tracker now lists 78 rounds in 2026 totaling $342.4 billion, and October’s 16 rounds are the most of any month except September. OpenAI’s $30 billion talks sit in the Reported talks table until a round is announced.

What to watch next week

• October 27–28: The Federal Reserve’s policy meeting, with the statement on October 28 at 2 p.m. ET and the chair’s press conference at 2:30 p.m. Kalshi priced a 92% chance of a hold as of our October 24 report.
• October 28: Microsoft and Alphabet report after the close, the first read on cloud and AI capital spending for the September quarter.
• October 29: Amazon reports after the close, with AWS growth in focus.
• Around October 30: OpenAI’s reported target for signed commitments in its round of up to $30 billion.
• November 2: Apple’s September-quarter earnings call, at 5 p.m. ET.

The bottom line

The week’s message was discipline at the top and appetite below it. OpenAI’s investors are negotiating its price down, Nscale’s IPO buyers are pushing back on its valuation, and stocks barely out-earn Treasurys. Yet seven AI startups raised $100 million or more in five days, and Salesforce paid a 58% premium for growth. Next week’s Fed decision and hyperscaler earnings will show whether the spending behind all of it still holds up.

This article is journalism, not investment advice. Do your own research before investing.

Wealth Engine researches and drafts with AI tools and checks every figure against its sources. How we report.