OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly pushing to take the company public as early as the fourth quarter of 2026, while also telling investors that OpenAI could spend up to $600 billion over the next five years on compute infrastructure. According to The Information, the plan has exposed a clear internal split over how fast the company should expand and how much financial strain that pace would create.
$600 billion plan centers on servers and cloud capacity
The report says Altman has kept an aggressive posture around artificial general intelligence, or AGI. To reduce OpenAI’s dependence on Microsoft and secure access to global data center capacity, the company has committed roughly $600 billion by 2030 for servers and cloud infrastructure. That figure is below Altman’s previously stated $1.4 trillion long-term vision, but it still represents an enormous capital program as OpenAI competes with Anthropic and Google for compute.
CFO Sarah Friar questions timing and spending pace
The sharpest concern appears to come from the finance side. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has reportedly raised objections to both the compressed IPO timeline and the scale of the planned spending. She is said to prefer delaying the IPO until 2027 and has questioned whether the company’s current revenue growth can support such an aggressive investment cycle. Internal projections cited in the report show cash burn rising steeply by 2030, with the possibility of tens of billions of dollars in cumulative funding gaps and negative cash flow pressure.
Revenue is climbing, but compute costs remain heavy
OpenAI is growing quickly. The report says the company’s annual recurring revenue has already passed $20 billion, and its valuation has recently been discussed at around $800 billion. Even so, the cost of model training and inference continues to weigh on profitability. The issue for OpenAI is not only how to raise more capital, but whether it can turn enterprise demand into paid usage at a level that justifies such a large infrastructure commitment.
The debate now sits at the center of OpenAI’s next phase. Altman is pushing for speed in capital access and compute buildout, while the finance team is focused on cash flow and execution risk. With a late-2026 IPO target now part of the discussion, OpenAI’s funding strategy and spending discipline are under much closer scrutiny.