Oil Money Pours into OpenAI... UAE Funds Discuss Up to $10 Billion Investment

AI Agents Infiltrate Wikipedia Without Authorization
Safety Concerns Persist... IPO Delayed
Valuation Jumps 64% Compared to March

It has been reported that sovereign wealth fund-affiliated investment firms in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, are considering an investment of up to 13 trillion won in OpenAI, the developer behind ChatGPT. If this plan is executed, it would mean that one-third of OpenAI’s new fundraising—approximately 40 trillion won—would come from Middle Eastern oil money. Despite ongoing controversies surrounding the safety of artificial intelligence (AI) agents, an enormous inflow of oil money into OpenAI continues unabated.

According to Bloomberg News on the 5th (local time), anonymous sources revealed that OpenAI is negotiating with UAE investment funds—including Abu Dhabi’s AI investment company MGX—to participate in a funding round totaling 30 billion dollars (approximately 40 trillion won).

The UAE funds are pushing to form a consortium to join the investment, with the total investment expected to reach up to 10 billion dollars (about 13 trillion won). BlackRock is reportedly discussing investing alongside them. However, as fundraising negotiations are still ongoing, the specific terms could change.

Major Middle Eastern capital is emerging as a core source of funding for big U.S. tech companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic. MGX previously participated in investment rounds for both companies. Earlier this year, it was reported that about 50 billion dollars (around 67 trillion won) was raised to expand investments in AI infrastructure and technology.

Additionally, OpenAI is reportedly discussing participation in this round with other major existing investors, including the University of California endowment fund, Thrive Capital, and Andreessen Horowitz.

OpenAI’s valuation is expected to soar. In this process of raising 30 billion dollars, the company set its pre-money valuation at around 1.4 trillion dollars. In March 2026, OpenAI had a valuation of 852 billion dollars when it raised 122 billion dollars in funding. If this investment round proceeds as planned, OpenAI’s value will have risen by about 64% in just a few months.

Notably, for this round, OpenAI has almost fixed the pre-money valuation at 1.4 trillion dollars, without naming a lead investor. Bloomberg News pointed out that, typically, investors propose investment conditions and then negotiate with the company to decide both valuation and lead investor, making this an unusual step for OpenAI.

While fundraising is proceeding smoothly, safety concerns around OpenAI agents persist—for instance, these agents have reportedly infiltrated external institutional websites without authorization. The Wikimedia Foundation, which operates Wikipedia, announced that it discovered OpenAI’s AI agents had accessed the Wikipedia platform without authorization. It also speculated that some service outages on the platform in May were triggered by AI agents scraping millions of Wikipedia pages and querying hundreds of thousands of datapoints. In July, the agents similarly accessed sites such as the global AI open-source platform Hugging Face, as well as sites operated by the U.S. and Australian governments, without permission.

OpenAI has postponed its initial public offering (IPO) plans until next year at the earliest, citing a focus on AI safety initiatives. CEO Sam Altman said last week, “It would not be good for the world for OpenAI to delay its listing for too long,” but also emphasized, “We are not going to rush headlong into an IPO by mobilizing all forces at once.”

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.