The internal tension between OpenAI's aggressive expansion path and financial prudence is emerging.
According to The Information, CEO Sam Altman privately expressed his hope to complete the IPO as early as the fourth quarter of this year, while CFO Sarah Friar had expressed a completely opposite view to her colleagues earlier this year, believing that the company did not yet have the conditions to go public.
Friar's concerns point directly to the company's financial reality: OpenAI has committed to spending over $600 billion over the next five years to rent servers, while warning investors that the company's cash consumption by 2030 will exceed twice previous forecasts, and the scale of the burn may exceed $200 billion.
According to a person who has communicated with Friar, she still has doubts about whether the company's revenue growth slowdown can support such a large expenditure commitment. At the same time, competitor Anthropic is eroding OpenAI's market share, further intensifying external pressure.
In response to reports of a rift in their relationship, Altman and Friar jointly issued a statement stating that both parties have; Making persistent computing power acquisition a core strategy of OpenAI; At this point; Completely consistent; And stated that both individuals have been involved in the past year or so; Directly involved in every major computing power decision;.
There are differences in the IPO schedule
Despite Friar's reservations, OpenAI has begun preparations for its IPO. The company has hired Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen& Katz and two law firms have had informal contacts with the IPO underwriting teams of Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.
Altman's intention to go public also carries a clear competitive motive. He privately expressed his hope that OpenAI's IPO would be completed earlier than Anthropic, which is currently discussing going public in the fourth quarter of this year. If the IPO goes ahead, the transaction size is expected to rank among the largest IPOs in history.
Friar's resistance to rapid listing is not without evidence. She publicly stated in an interview with The Wall Street Journal in November last year that, IPO" Currently not included in the plan; Because the company is still committed to '; Adjust the company to a state that matches its current size;.
The internal power structure is quietly changing
At the organizational level, an unusual change has already occurred: Friar no longer reports directly to Altman since August last year, but instead reports to Fidji Simo, the head of the application business. The CFO reporting directly to executives other than the CEO is a rare arrangement in large companies.
According to multiple close colleagues, Altman has excluded Friar from several important discussions related to financial planning.
One of the cases is that Altman did not invite Friar to participate in a recent discussion on server spending with a major investor in OpenAI, despite her attendance at a previous meeting on the same topic.
A participant stated that her absence was; Conspicuous and embarrassing;. Another source stated that Friar was also not invited to an executive level meeting earlier this year that involved major financial decisions.
The promise of sky high computing power hides financial risks
OpenAI's current computing power expenditure plan is unprecedented in scale.
OpenAI has signed server leasing contracts totaling approximately $665 billion, covering:
Oracle bone script (approximately $300 billion, five-year term, starting from 2027);
Microsoft (250 billion US dollars, until 2032);
Amazon Web Services (approximately $138 billion, eight year term);
CoreWeave ($22 billion, five-year term);
Multiple partners including Cerebras ($10 billion).
These commitments are not ordinary cloud computing contracts. Friar has explained that the construction cycle of AI data centers can last for several years, and OpenAI must book production capacity in advance.
" I must make a decision today to ensure that we have sufficient computing power in 2028, 2029, and even 2030. If I don't place an order today, the data center won't exist. "
In one case, as previously reported by The Information, OpenAI signed a risk sharing agreement with Oracle regarding the issue of data center construction cost overruns, which is a rare clause in cloud computing customer contracts. Currently, OpenAI has shelved its previous plan to build its own data center.
The dual pressure of income growth rate and cash consumption
The external competitive landscape is accelerating its tightening. Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in selling AI models to enterprises and application developers, while Google Gemini continues to erode ChatGPT's dominant position in the consumer chatbot market.
OpenAI has raised its revenue forecast for the next five years by 27% this year, but has also privately disclosed to investors during the same period that its cash consumption by 2030 will exceed twice the forecast from last summer.
In addition, the company informed investors that last year's gross profit margin was lower than expected due to user demand exceeding expectations, forcing the company to temporarily purchase computing power at higher prices.
Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei spoke frankly about the dangers of investing in data centers ahead of schedule in February of this year on the Dwarkesh Patel podcast, using language that hinted at OpenAI:
" If I make a mistake in judgment, even if it's only one year away... you will go bankrupt. My impression is that some companies have not taken this account seriously and do not truly understand the risks they are taking on. "
This highly echoes Friar's concerns expressed internally. A person who worked closely with the two described the CFO's situation as follows:; She is facing a founder who has ambitious goals and hopes to give it all in terms of expenses, which is a difficult job. "
