Speaking at the Dublin Tech Summit on Wednesday, OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Friar, addressed the company’s recent structural shifts and long-term funding ambitions, making it clear that while an IPO is not on the immediate agenda, the company is positioning itself to keep the option open.
“A public benefit corporation gets us to an IPO-able event… if and when we want to,” Friar said, referring to OpenAI’s conversion of its for-profit arm into a Public Benefit Corporation (PBC), a hybrid business model that balances the pursuit of profit with broader societal goals.
However, Friar was quick to clarify that no concrete plans have been set in motion. “Nobody tweet in this room that Sarah Friar just said anything about OpenAI ultimately going public,” she joked, preempting speculation. “I did not. I said it could happen.”
The PBC model, introduced last December and revised earlier this month, allows OpenAI’s nonprofit parent to maintain significant control through its shareholding in the for-profit subsidiary. This setup enables the company to raise new capital while maintaining a governance structure focused on ethical deployment of advanced AI technologies.
Any decision to go public, Friar emphasized, would depend not only on OpenAI’s internal trajectory but also on external factors like market sentiment. “You can show up at the altar all ready to go, and if the market’s not ready for you, yeah, you’re just out of luck,” she said. “Which is why you have to build a company that can be sustainable and safe regardless of where the public markets are.”
She also stressed the importance of financial predictability as a prerequisite for any potential IPO, noting that while investors may tolerate some level of volatility, consistent and scalable growth remains key. “The market will put up with a certain degree of unpredictability… but it doesn’t really love it.”
Friar gave a glimpse into the massive infrastructure demands OpenAI faces. A 1-gigawatt data center footprint, she explained, could cost around $50 billion — and the company’s ambitions could push that figure much higher. “Our appetite and ambition over the next couple of years is to get closer to about 10 gigawatts,” she said, highlighting the scale of capital required to stay competitive in AI.
One major area of focus is AI-driven search, which Friar described as a rapidly expanding market. “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 built the next state-of-the-art product,” she said, underscoring the company’s commitment to innovation over short-term cost savings.
OpenAI, which counts Microsoft among its most significant backers with an investment exceeding $13 billion, continues to balance aggressive technological development with responsible governance and long-term vision. Whether or not it goes public, the company appears committed to maintaining flexibility in how it secures the enormous resources needed to push the frontiers of artificial intelligence.