Regarding the timing of the IPO, there is an internal disagreement at OpenAI: Altman hopes for a fourth-quarter IPO, while the CFO believes the company is not yet ready to go public.

Source: Wall Street On Demand

Internal tension at OpenAI—between an aggressive expansion strategy and financial prudence—is starting to come into view.

According to The Information, CEO Sam Altman privately said he hopes to complete an IPO as early as this year’s fourth quarter. Earlier this year, Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told colleagues a completely different view: that the company is not yet ready to go public.

Friar’s concerns point directly to the company’s financial reality: OpenAI has committed to spending more than $600 billion over the next five years to lease servers, while warning investors that its cash burn through 2030 will exceed its earlier forecast by more than two times—meaning the scale of spending could be more than $200 billion.

One person who has spoken with Friar said she still has doubts about whether the company’s slowing revenue growth can support such a spending commitment. At the same time, competitor Anthropic is eating into OpenAI’s market share, further intensifying external pressure.

In response to reports that cracks have appeared in the relationship between the two, Altman and Friar jointly issued a statement saying the two are “fully aligned” on making the “acquisition of durable compute capacity as OpenAI’s core strategy,” and that over the past year and more, both have “directly participated in every major compute-capacity decision.”

Differences over the IPO timeline

Despite Friar’s reservations, OpenAI has begun working on preparations ahead of the IPO. The company has hired two law firms—Cooley and Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz—and has held informal discussions with the IPO underwriting teams at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

Altman’s desire to list quickly also has clear competitive motives. He privately said he wants OpenAI’s IPO to be completed before Anthropic finishes, and the latter is currently discussing listing in the fourth quarter of this year. If the IPO goes through, the deal size would be poised to rank among the largest IPOs in history.

Friar’s resistance to moving quickly to market is not without precedent. In November of last year, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, she said publicly that an IPO is “currently not planned,” because the company is still working on “bringing the company into a state that matches its current scale.”

The internal power structure is quietly changing

At the organizational structure level, an unusual change has already taken place: since August last year, Friar no longer reports directly to Altman, and instead reports to Fidji Simo, the head of the application business. Having the CFO report to executives other than the CEO is a rare arrangement at large companies.

According to multiple people who work closely with the two, Altman has excluded Friar from several important discussions involving financial planning.

One example is that when Altman recently discussed server spending with a major investor in OpenAI, he did not invite Friar, even though she attended a meeting on the same topic prior to that.

One attendee said her absence was “obvious and awkward.” Another person said that earlier this year, at an executive-level meeting involving major financial decisions, Friar was not invited either.

High-priced compute commitments hide financial risks

OpenAI’s current compute spending plan is unprecedented in scale.

The total value of server lease agreements OpenAI has already signed is about $665 billion, covering:

Oracle (about $300 billion, five-year term, starting in 2027);

Microsoft ($250 billion, through 2032);

Amazon Web Services (about $138 billion, eight-year term);

CoreWeave ($22 billion, five-year term);

Cerebras ($10 billion);

and multiple other partners.

These commitments are not ordinary cloud computing contracts. Friar previously explained that AI data center construction cycles can last several years, so OpenAI must reserve capacity in advance.

“I have to make decisions today to ensure we have enough compute capacity in 2028, 2029, and even 2030. If I don’t place orders today, the data centers won’t show up.”

In one case, as The Information reported earlier, OpenAI and Oracle signed a risk-sharing agreement over data center construction cost overruns—an unusually rare term in customer contracts for cloud computing. At present, OpenAI has shelved its earlier plan to build data centers in-house.

Dual pressure: revenue growth and cash burn

The external competitive landscape is tightening faster. Anthropic has surpassed OpenAI in selling AI models to enterprise and application developers, while Google Gemini continues to erode ChatGPT’s dominance in the consumer chatbot market.

This year, OpenAI raised its revenue expectations for the next five years by 27%, but in the same period it privately told investors that its cash burn through 2030 will exceed the value predicted in last summer’s forecast by more than two times.

In addition, the company told investors that last year’s gross margin was below expectations because user demand exceeded expectations, forcing the company to temporarily procure compute capacity at higher prices.

In February of this year, Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei said directly in a Dwarkesh Patel podcast that the danger of investing in data centers ahead of schedule is real, with wording that implicitly points at OpenAI:

“If I get the judgment wrong—just by a year—you’ll go bankrupt. My impression is that some companies didn’t really run the numbers seriously, and they don’t truly understand the risks they’re taking on.”

This closely echoes the concerns Friar has expressed internally. A person who has worked closely with the two described the CFO’s situation this way: “She’s dealing with a founder who has big ambitions and wants to go all-in on spending. That’s a very hard job.”

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