However, even as OpenAI switches its for-profit arm into a public benefit corporation (PBC), Friar said the timing of an initial public offering (IPO) would depend on the market and the company’s readiness, according to the report.
“A PBC gets us to an IPO-able event … if and when we want to,” Friar said during the Dublin Tech Summit, per the report.
“Nobody tweet in this room that Sarah Friar just said anything about OpenAI ultimately going public,” she said, according to the report. “I did not. I said it could happen.”
To give a sense of the “massive” scale of capital that OpenAI could require, Friar said that while a 1-gigawatt data center footprint costs about $50 billion, the company’s “appetite and ambition” in the years to come is to get closer to about 10 gigawatts, the report said.
Friar also touted the fast-growing AI search market as a priority and said that while OpenAI would pursue efficiencies, its focus is on discovering the next innovative product, according to the report.
“The search market is becoming a big market,” Friar said, per the report. “In that world, I don’t really want people spending an inordinate amount of time trying to save an extra 1% when I would rather they went out and kind of built the next state-of-the-art product.”
OpenAI announced last year that it aimed to turn the for-profit side of its business into a PBC, which would let it balance investor returns with social goals. Earlier this month, the company changed its plans, giving its nonprofit parent control of the PBC, while still allowing the for-profit arm to raise new capital.
Writing about the AI industry earlier this week, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster likened OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to other “difficult” tech founders of the past who invented products or systems that reinvented their industry.
“He isn’t building just another tech startup, and OpenAI isn’t just another software company,” Webster wrote of Altman. “In 30 months, we’ve witnessed the evolution of a platform that turned ‘GPT’ into a verb and GenAI into a globally and generationally understood concept.”
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