OpenAI’s (OPAI.PVT) torrid pace of growth is poised to keep on going right into 2026.
“Revenue this year will grow over 3X. So about $13 billion in revenue from about $4 billion last year. So it’s tripling on a very big base as well,” OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told me at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia conference on Tuesday.
“It is a wild pace that we’re on. You’re defining a whole new era of AI,” Friar said. She declined to put a timetable on OpenAI becoming a public company.
It’s been an eventful year for OpenAI. The release of ChatGPT 5 in early August was met with mixed reviews as users complained about the interface’s less-human responses. CEO Sam Altman acknowledged the company “screwed up” on the rollout.
A few weeks removed from this episode, Altman reportedly said the AI market was in a bubble.
Around the same time, the New York Times reported OpenAI was in talks to sell $6 billion in shares by current and former employees to investors. The deal would value OpenAI at about $500 billion, up from a $300 billion valuation in March.
Careful scrutiny remains, too, about the health of OpenAI partner and major investor Microsoft (MSFT).
OpenAI wants Microsoft to ease up its hold on its AI offerings as it ramps up growth. The pact between the two is slated to last until 2030 but could end earlier if OpenAI’s board declares it has developed artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman downplayed any tension in the partnership in an interview with me in June.
“The relationship’s in pretty good shape,” he said. “It’s one of the best technology partnerships there has been, and it will continue for at least another five years, hopefully many decades after that.”
Meanwhile, investors question how long the AI hyper-growth cycle can last.
“We’re in the first inning, a lot of people have compared the AI era to things like the railway build-out, because it is a very capital-intensive build-out. But I think we are just beginning. We’ve maybe laid some track from New York to Baltimore, but we’re ultimately going to blanket the US and ultimately blanket the world,” said Friar.
“And so anyone who thinks this cycle is, you know, at a zenith is not seeing what I’m seeing.”
Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance’s Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance’s editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.
