OpenAI remains at the center of the artificial intelligence landscape, thanks to a slate of recent deals that have sent shockwaves through the industry. The company closed out September by inking a data center agreement with Nvidia, coordinating with Oracle and SoftBank to add five data center sites to the Stargate project and announcing a multi-year partnership with Databricks.
What Has Open AI Been Up to Lately?
OpenAI has landed deals with companies like Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and Roi to expand its AI infrastructure and pivot to more personalized AI. It has also launched new Sora products and AI browser to rake in more revenue.
October is shaping up to be an even bigger month for the AI startup, which recently completed a deal that saw current and former employees sell around $6.6 billion in shares to a group of investors that includes SoftBank and T. Rowe Price. With this transaction in the books, OpenAI now boasts a valuation of $500 billion, up from $300 billion, reportedly making it the world’s most valuable private company. It also announced a partnership with Broadcom to develop custom AI accelerators, and CEO Sam Altman has said there are even more collaborations underway.
All these moves are part of OpenAI’s strategy to spearhead enterprise growth and branch out from ChatGPT, with a seemingly endless stream of deals and product launches filling up the month of October. That said, the immediate rewards of rapid business expansion may eventually give way to concerns around what this means for the startup’s nonprofit roots, and whether this kind of development is sustainable — both for OpenAI and the AI industry as a whole.
What to Know About OpenAI’s Latest Moves
The month of October was filled with a series of announcements that marked OpenAI’s expansion into more consumer-friendly tech spaces, while also reinforcing its AI initiatives.
Launching the Atlas AI Browser
OpenAI has launched its own AI browser called Atlas, which integrates ChatGPT as a built-in feature that users can access while navigating the internet. It also comes with agentic AI features for automating various tasks, with the goal of helping users maximize their productivity. People can use Atlas to organize their tabs, draft emails, discover and purchase items, summarize web pages and much more.
This is the latest of many AI browsers to hit the market over the last year — chief among them is Perplexity’s Comet, which runs on the company’s proprietary AI search engine. Of course, Google still rules the internet search industry for the most part, with its Chrome browser holding about 75 percent of the global market share. Still, that dominance has begun to falter with the rise of ChatGPT and generative AI in general, and Atlas could prove to be the tipping point that finally topples Chrome on the way toward OpenAI’s ultimate goal of total AI supremacy.
“We think that AI represents a rare, once-in-a-decade opportunity to rethink what a browser can be about,” Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO, said during a company livestream. “The way that we hope people will use the internet in the future — and what we’re starting to see — is that the chat experience and a web browser can be a great analog.”
Launching Sora 2 and the Sora App
OpenAI announced Sora 2, an updated version of the original Sora model. This time around, Sora 2 can generate more complex videos without succumbing to different hallucinations, leading to more realistic outputs. It can also process more specific instructions and produce videos in unique styles like anime and cinematic.
The model is designed to be used with OpenAI’s new Sora app, which has quickly become one of the most popular apps on Apple’s App Store. A notable feature of the app is the ability for users to create their own AI-generated videos that star themselves and their friends, further merging the worlds of AI and social media.
Acquiring Roi
Venturing deeper into the consumer space, OpenAI acquired Roi, a startup best known for its AI-driven finance app. The app serves as a central hub for tracking and managing a user’s financial activities across stocks, NFTs, crypto and other assets. OpenAI seems to be turning its attention toward more personalized AI — something that aligns with Roi’s expertise and its CEO’s broader vision.
“We started Roi 3 years ago to make investing accessible to everyone by building the most personalized financial experience,” Sujith Vishwajith, CEO and co-founder of Roi, said in a post on X. “Along the way we realized personalization isn’t just the future of finance. It’s the future of software.”
Partnering With AMD
OpenAI and semiconductor company AMD established a partnership that will see AMD provide its chips to power 6 gigawatts-worth of OpenAI’s AI infrastructure. According to the terms, OpenAI will use AMD’s Instinct MI450 GPU and have the option to buy up to 160 million shares in AMD’s common stock.
The agreement is a win-win for both companies. On one hand, OpenAI secures the AI chips and computing power needed to continue scaling its infrastructure in the pursuit of more advanced AI. Meanwhile, AMD’s stock skyrocketed by 38 percent following the announcement, helping it emerge as a contender in an AI chip race that has largely been dominated by Nvidia.
Partnering with Broadcom
OpenAI has also partnered with another semiconductor maker, Broadcom, to co-develop custom AI accelerators and systems capable of delivering up to 10 gigawatts of computing power. By designing its own chips, OpenAI says it can embed insights from existing AI models directly into the hardware, which will be deployed across its facilities and partner data centers using Broadcom’s Ethernet and connectivity systems to scale globally.
This move builds on a long-standing relationship between the two companies, and complements OpenAI’s recent partnerships with Nvidia and Oracle. While no financial details were officially disclosed, sources told The Wall Street Journal that the deal is worth several billion dollars. Broadcom’s stock also rose about 10 percent following the announcement — a trend seen among several other companies who have partnered with OpenAI lately.
Releasing ChatGPT Apps and the Apps SDK
ChatGPT is no longer OpenAI’s sole focus, but it’s still a core component of the company’s strategy. OpenAI announced that ChatGPT users will now have direct access to apps within ChatGPT, including Spotify, Zillow and Coursera. Users can then interact with these apps using natural language commands and queries, resulting in a smoother experience.
The same announcement also confirmed the arrival of OpenAI’s Apps SDK (software development kit). As an open-source collection of tools, Apps SDK enables developers to build the logic and interface of their own applications and run them on any platform compatible with the toolkit’s standards.
Why All This Growth Could Spell Trouble for OpenAI
Although each bold business decision has generated plenty of attention and excitement around OpenAI, more growth comes with extensive risks as well.
Shifting Away From a Nonprofit Mindset
As a nonprofit, OpenAI’s mission has been to “solve humanity’s hardest problems.” While it can be argued that products like ChatGPT can be used to boost productivity and improve decision-making, it’s less clear what noble purpose the company’s latest slate of consumer products serves. In fact, OpenAI researchers have shared their fears and worries about Sora 2, especially considering common issues that plague social media like deepfakes and endless scrolling. Perhaps more telling, Altman admitted that Sora is essentially a money grab.
“We do mostly need the capital for build AI that can do science, and for sure we are focused on AGI with almost all of our research effort,” he said in a post on X. “Reality is nuanced when it comes to optimal trajectories for a company.”
Creating Potential Copyright Conflicts
The Sora mobile app has already landed OpenAI in hot water in response to the rise of deepfakes on the app. But an even bigger issue is that some of the content used to create AI-generated videos may include copyrighted content, opening the door for AI copyright lawsuits.
To avoid an issue that has long affected platforms like TikTok and Facebook, OpenAI has taken measures to empower copyright holders when their characters are used on Sora. The policy change is aimed at reducing any tensions with individuals and companies, but there’s always the chance that lingering copyright concerns lead to legal challenges later down the road.
Chasing Too Many Business Opportunities
OpenAI’s business deals and product launches are designed to provide the additional streams of revenue needed to satisfy AI’s increasing appetite. According to a Bain & Company report, the computational demands of AI may jump to 100 gigawatts in the U.S. and 200 gigawatts globally by 2030. This means more powerful AI chips, data centers and other infrastructure will be necessary to fuel more complex AI models, compelling Altman to travel abroad and lock down more deals in Asia and the Middle East.
However, the push to diversify OpenAI’s portfolio and revenue sources may be undermining the company’s ability to focus on crucial projects. Take OpenAI’s mystery device, for instance. Designer Jony Ive and Altman have struggled to figure out basic details surrounding how the device will interact with users, and dividing leadership’s attention between other initiatives certainly doesn’t help.
Simply investing more in AI also doesn’t guarantee success. After all, OpenAI’s GPT-5 model was heralded as the next step toward AGI, only to fall flat and alienate loyal users due to a chaotic rollout. As a result, a wave of new products and partners puts even more pressure on OpenAI to start raking in massive profits and keep pace with AI’s intensifying demands, which may be too unrealistic a feat for any AI company to achieve.
How OpenAI Could Be Contributing to a Major AI Bubble
Questions around the sustainability of OpenAI’s business have fueled deeper concerns about the financial state of the AI industry as a whole. OpenAI’s deals follow a wider pattern of dealmaking where the biggest AI players strike agreements that merely result in them shuffling capital and resources between each other. Industry growth can then be attributed to a small circle of tech titans rather than broader interest from companies or consumers.
The fear is that this trend confirms the existence of an AI bubble that could have a similar impact as the dotcom bubble. According to market researcher Renaissance Macro Research, AI capital expenditure has contributed more to GDP growth than all of consumer spending, so an AI bubble that bursts could have a sizable effect on the U.S. economy.
Of course, OpenAI continues to thrive amid the increasingly high expectations for AI. But if revenue streams dry up or feeding AI’s appetite for energy proves to be unsustainable, the collapse of the industry could send tremors across various sectors that will be felt long after tech giants like OpenAI have fallen.
Frequently Asked Questions
What major partnerships has OpenAI announced recently?
OpenAI has announced new partnerships with Nvidia, Databricks, Broadcom and AMD. In addition, the company reached an agreement with Oracle and SoftBank to add five data center sites to the Stargate project and finalized the acquisition of AI finance company Roi.
Why is OpenAI expanding so aggressively?
As AI’s computational demands increase, OpenAI needs to diversify its revenue streams to be able to fund its pursuit of advanced forms of AI, such as artificial general intelligence. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has even confessed that its new Sora iOS app is meant to bring in more funds to maintain the company’s AI initiatives.
How might OpenAI’s expansion affect the AI industry as a whole?
OpenAI’s business deals reflect a larger pattern of AI titans making larger and larger agreements with each other, resulting in massive resources being exchanged within a small circle of companies. This means that the AI industry may be driven by a few big names rather than broader corporate or consumer interest, potentially signaling an AI bubble that’s about to burst.
Why does OpenAI’s deal with Broadcom matter?
OpenAI’s deal with Broadcom will give the company an opportunity to co-develop AI-specific hardware, including accelerators and chips. This gives OpenAI more control over its infrastructure and could unlock greater efficiency by optimizing software and hardware components. The deal will also expand OpenAI’s compute power by 10 gigawatts.
