OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar: The Midterm Elections Will Not Change AI Infrastructure Investment Plans
OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said in an interview with Sara Eisen on CNBC on Friday that the company will not change its AI infrastructure investment plans because of the outcome of the U.S. midterm elections. She said that demand is real, that the company will continue working with major hyperscalers, and that it will meet customer demand through financing; the election results have not materially changed the company’s business, but as data centers have drawn more attention, it will continue to strengthen communication with local communities and build trust.
Friar said that when thinking about the midterm elections, it is still necessary to focus on how to keep investing to meet customer demand; the starting point is that relationships have already been established with all hyperscalers, and continuing will mean financing. She also confirmed that the company had previously said it would continue to consider going public in 2027, and that the outcome of the midterm elections does not change that plan. In the interview, she said the current round’s pre-money valuation was $1.25 trillion (the context of the conversation and the explanation of about a 50% increase from the March round point to this figure), that the round is ongoing, and that she is confident it will close. The company’s third-quarter business grew 70% quarter over quarter, and enterprise business doubled.
CNBC cited Ballotpedia analysis and its own collected results, saying that in 41 local data center-related votes across 10 states, voters supported measures restricting construction or opposing pro-development measures in all but one item. The opposition was mainly focused on rising electricity costs, environmental damage, and the impact on jobs. OpenAI had previously filed a confidential S-1 with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but this fact was not reiterated in detail in the interview.
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Title: CNBC Exclusive: Transcript: OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar Speaks with CNBC’s Sara Eisen on “Squawk on the Street” Today Publisher: CNBC Publication date: 2026-11-06 URL: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/11/06/cnbc-exclusive-transcript-openai-cfo-sarah-friar-speaks-with-cnbcs-sara-eisen-on-squawk-on-the-street-today.html Nature of source: media report (official interview transcript) Verification status: full transcript read for this report (including key passages) Supported content: Friar’s direct remarks on the election not changing the investment plan, cooperation with hyperscalers, continued financing, consideration of a 2027 listing, the current round valuation statement, and Q3 growth data; background references in the AI interpretation regarding the person’s role and capital-path history facts
ABAB AI Insight
Sarah Friar became OpenAI’s first chief financial officer in June 2024. Previously, she served as chief financial officer of Block (formerly Square) from 2012 to 2018, leading the company’s 2015 IPO and contributing to about $30 billion in market value growth; from 2018 to 2024, she was chief executive officer of Nextdoor, where she guided the company to go public via SPAC. Her background spans equity research (Goldman Sachs), financial strategy (Salesforce), and public-market operations, making her a key figure in connecting OpenAI to private capital and a potential path to the public markets.
On the capital-path side, OpenAI completed a $122 billion financing round in March 2026 at an after-investment valuation of $852 billion. Major anchor investors included Amazon (up to $50 billion), Nvidia, and SoftBank (each $30 billion), and individual investors through banking channels were opened for the first time. Friar described the current round as ongoing, with a pre-money valuation of about $1.25 trillion (roughly a 50% increase from the March round), to support continued growth in compute and customer demand. The funds are flowing mainly into computing infrastructure, model training, and service capacity rather than purely into operating cash; in the co-investment structure, the roles of strategic partners and financial investors should be viewed according to the disclosed rounds, and the share of the current round, which has not yet closed, has not been finalized.
Compared with historical cases, data center expansion in the 2010s encountered local power and environmental resistance, but at that time it was mainly absorbed by a small number of hyperscale cloud providers through long-term power purchase agreements and community compensation. This time, AI compute demand is more concentrated and growing faster, and local votes have directly politicized electricity costs, water usage, and employment issues; the similarity is that capital can still maintain supply through hyperscaler relationships and new financing, rather than relying on a single local approval path. OpenAI’s reliance on external cloud-provider compute differs from a primarily self-built path, and the direct impact of the election results on already contracted capacity is limited.
This statement changes OpenAI’s pace of capital access and the priority of its community strategy under local political noise: the demand side (70% quarter-over-quarter growth in Q3, enterprise business doubling) continues to drive investment, the election has not blocked financing or consideration of a 2027 listing, but it has increased the execution cost of community trust-building. Indicators to watch include the final size and valuation of the current round, as well as progress on local approvals and power-cost agreements for new data center projects; if local restrictions continue to expand, the unit cost of obtaining computing power may rise, but this has not yet changed the overall availability of capital supply.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Local votes can increase community costs for data centers, but they do not automatically cut off already established hyperscaler compute relationships and financing channels.
When demand growth and capital-round progress move in parallel, election results change the communication pace more than the investment decision itself.