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In-DepthJun 25, 2026

OpenAI: The Valuation Logic of a Technology Platform, Strategic Capital, and Compute Empire

Core view. OpenAI is no longer best understood as “just an AI model company.” By mid-2026, it looks more like an emerging full-stack intelligence platform: consumer products such as ChatGPT and Codex on top, enterprise agent infrastructure such as Frontier in the middle, and multi-cloud, multi-chip, data center, power, and custom-chip strategy at the bottom. OpenAI itself describes this as a flywheel in which more compute enables better models, better models enable better products, better products drive adoption and revenue, and revenue pays for more compute. Organizational evolution. OpenAI began in 2015 as a nonprofit with the mission of ensuring AGI benefits all of humanity. In 2019 it created a for-profit subsidiary, while keeping nonprofit control, and Microsoft invested $1 billion and partnered on Azure supercomputing. After the 2023 ChatGPT and GPT-4 breakout, governance pressure intensified. In 2025, OpenAI completed a recapitalization: the nonprofit became the OpenAI Foundation, the operating company became OpenAI Group PBC, and the Foundation remained in control. As of closing, the Foundation held 26% of equity, Microsoft about 27%, and the remaining 47% was held by current and former employees and investors. In June 2026, OpenAI said it had confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO. Technology platform. OpenAI now operates across at least four layers: consumer AI products, enterprise workplace products, developer APIs and tools, and agent distribution/execution products. Frontier is explicitly positioned as a platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents that can do real work inside companies. On the developer side, OpenAI has moved toward agent-native infrastructure through the Responses API, built-in search and file tools, computer use, the Agents SDK, and observability. OpenAI said at DevDay 2025 that 4 million developers had built with OpenAI, ChatGPT had 800M+ weekly users, and the API platform processed 6B tokens per minute; by March 2026, the company said API throughput had risen above 15B tokens per minute. Strategic capital and partner network. Microsoft remains the historically central investor and infrastructure partner, with total funding commitments of $13 billion disclosed in Microsoft’s 2025 annual report. But OpenAI has clearly shifted beyond a single-cloud dependency. By 2025, Microsoft’s exclusivity on new capacity had been relaxed into a right of first refusal, while OpenAI gained flexibility to build elsewhere. In 2026, OpenAI announced $110B of new investment at a $730B pre-money valuation, including $30B from SoftBank, $30B from NVIDIA, and $50B from Amazon; by March 2026 it said the round closed at $122B of committed capital and an $852B post-money valuation. Oracle, SoftBank, NVIDIA, Amazon, CoreWeave, Google Cloud, Broadcom, AMD, AWS Trainium, and Cerebras all now appear in OpenAI’s disclosed infrastructure map. This is not just financing; it is a supply-chain and compute-alliance strategy. Compute and cost logic. OpenAI’s own disclosure says available compute grew from about 0.2GW in 2023 to 0.6GW in 2024 and roughly 1.9GW in 2025, while ARR grew from $2B to $6B to $20B+. That makes compute the clearest operating bottleneck in the business. External estimates from Epoch AI suggest OpenAI spent about $7B on cloud compute in 2024, with roughly $5B for R&D-related compute and about $2B for inference, and that much of the R&D spend went to experiments and unreleased work rather than just final training runs of released models. In 2025, Reuters, citing the Financial Times, reported about $34B in total spending, including roughly $19B in R&D; Reuters also reported, citing The Information, that OpenAI burned $3.7B in Q1 2026 against $5.7B in revenue. Public information is still incomplete, but the broad conclusion is clear: OpenAI has proven demand faster than it has proven durable cash generation. Infrastructure strategy and unit economics. OpenAI is moving from renting compute to locking in compute. Stargate is central to that shift. In July 2025, OpenAI said Oracle and OpenAI would develop an additional 4.5GW of Stargate data center capacity, taking total capacity under development above 5GW and more than 2 million chips; by September 2025, it said Stargate had nearly 7GW of planned capacity and more than $400B in investment over three years. In June 2026, OpenAI unveiled its first custom inference chip, Jalapeño, co-developed with Broadcom, saying early testing showed substantially better performance per watt than current state-of-the-art. Reuters reported the design is aimed at lowering inference costs and reducing OpenAI’s dependence on Nvidia GPUs. This is strong evidence that OpenAI is trying to become not only a model company, but also an infrastructure-design company. Business model and valuation expectations. OpenAI now monetizes across consumer subscriptions, enterprise seats, API usage, tool calls, and early-stage advertising. Public pricing shows Go at $8/month in the U.S., Plus at $20/month, and Pro at $200/month, while the free and Go tiers may include ads. On the API side, pricing spans from low-cost nano models to flagship models such as GPT-5.5 at $5 per 1M input tokens and $30 per 1M output tokens, with additional pricing for web search, file search, and containers. OpenAI also said in March 2026 that enterprise revenue was already more than 40% of total revenue and on track to approach parity with consumer revenue by the end of 2026. Valuation has risen accordingly: Reuters reported about $157B in October 2024, about $840B in February 2026, and OpenAI itself disclosed an $852B post-money valuation in March 2026. Based on the company’s statement that it was then generating about $2B in monthly revenue, that implies roughly a 35.5x annualized revenue multiple; using Reuters’ report of a $25B annualized run rate at the end of February 2026 against an $840B valuation implies roughly 33.6x. These are not normal SaaS multiples; they reflect a market belief that OpenAI may become a dominant intelligence platform plus scarce compute allocator. Controversies and unresolved questions. The biggest controversy is whether OpenAI can still credibly claim mission-first governance while operating at infrastructure scale and pursuing an IPO. Related issues include the 2023 board crisis, ongoing copyright litigation from The New York Times and multiple authors, and Elon Musk’s long-running allegation that OpenAI abandoned its nonprofit mission—though Reuters reported Musk lost that case in May 2026. There is also real competitive pressure: OpenAI remains the dominant consumer-facing AI brand by its own disclosure, but Ramp AI Index reported that Anthropic overtook OpenAI in business adoption in May 2026 among businesses in Ramp’s U.S. payments sample. The deepest open question is still economic, not technical: can OpenAI convert extraordinary usage and infrastructure scale into durable free cash flow before its capital commitments become too heavy? Public data is still limited, and some high-profile financial figures remain based on reporting rather than fully public audited filings.

In-DepthMay 27, 2026

VeChain & Sunny Lu: The Real Architecture of an Enterprise Blockchain Empire

VeChain is not merely a token project. It is better understood as a hybrid of enterprise-grade public blockchain infrastructure, a foundation-led operating body, a protocol economy, and a product suite serving both enterprises and end users. Its narrative has clearly evolved from anti-counterfeiting, traceability, and supply chains into sustainability, digital product passports, Web3 applications, and, by 2026, infrastructure for the agentic economy. Public records indicate at least two core co-founders. The most visible public founder is Sunny Lu, now CEO; in the MiCAR white paper, his legal name appears as Yang LU. The other crucial figure is Jay Zhang, who appears in current records as Jie Zhang. He was originally the co-founder and CFO and is now the chairman and legal representative of VeChain Foundation San Marino S.R.L. In practical terms, Sunny has been the strategic narrator, product-direction leader, and public representative, while Jay has been the architect of governance, finance, and risk structure. Sunny Lu’s edge is not that of a pure academic or protocol researcher. His public biographies consistently emphasize his enterprise IT and luxury-industry background, especially his role as CIO / IS&T Director of Louis Vuitton China. He has also explicitly framed VeChain as a project driven by applications first and technology second. That background explains why VeChain has always prioritized enterprise requirements, governance design, predictable operating costs, compliance dialogue, and integration tooling over maximalist decentralization narratives. VeChain’s growth path is unusually clear. It began with enterprise anti-counterfeiting and traceability, moved into public-chain infrastructure and dual-token economics, then into enterprise onboarding products such as ToolChain, and later pivoted toward sustainability, consumer-facing participation, digital product passports, and AI/agent infrastructure. It has not grown in a straight explosive line; instead, it has repeatedly changed gears and still remained alive—something few early enterprise-blockchain projects managed to do. Its most important assets are not only code and tokens, but also institutional networks. The hardest assets are the VeChainThor network, the VET/VTHO economy, the foundation treasury, and the wallet/governance/developer product stack. Its most important influence assets are long-term associations with DNV, PwC, Walmart China, BCG, UFC/Dana White, and more recently BitGo, Keyrock, Franklin Templeton, and Rekord. VeChain as an Organization VeChain’s official starting point is 2015. Official materials state that VeChain was founded in 2015 and describe VeChainThor as the smart-contract platform it created. Messari adds that the project initially moved under BitSE-supported private/consortium-chain conditions before becoming a more independent public-chain ecosystem. Official sources emphasize the 2015 project establishment and the 2018 VeChainThor launch; third-party research helps fill in the transition from a private-chain model to a public-chain model. The real organizational core is not a single company, but a layered structure. Whitepaper 1.0 presented the VeChain Foundation as the central operating body for daily development, community growth, business engagement, and technical maintenance of VeChainThor. Whitepaper 2.0 made it even clearer that the Steering Committee was the highest governance body, responsible for strategy, finance, protocol parameters, VTHO economics, and major votes. VeChain was therefore never designed as a purely leaderless blockchain. Its early governance model was defined by identifiable, vetted authority. Official documents repeatedly stressed that VeChainThor did not allow anonymous block producers. Authority Masternodes were approved by the Foundation/Steering Committee and required KYC; Whitepaper 2.0 even stated that, in the trial phase, public disclosure of an Authority Masternode’s status could be left to the node holder’s discretion. That design was enterprise- and compliance-friendly, but it naturally invited criticism from decentralization purists. VeChain has since tried to become more open. Messari in 2025 described its governance as semi-centralized, while also noting that the VeChain Renaissance roadmap aimed to reduce the top-layer role of the Steering Committee and increase protocol- and community-level governance. Official 2025 materials show that Hayabusa shifted core consensus from KYC-based PoA toward DPoS, while StarGate became the new staking and delegation gateway. In short, VeChain has been moving from “enterprise-friendly with strong central coordination” toward “more open, but still operationally pragmatic.” The Founders Sunny Lu’s family background is largely unavailable in reliable public English sources. His date of birth, place of birth, parents’ occupations, and family-class background cannot be firmly confirmed from high-quality public records. What can be stably confirmed is his education, enterprise IT career, senior Louis Vuitton China role, and the fact that he started VeChain in 2015. His educational profile is consistent across public sources. He is widely described as having graduated from Shanghai Jiao Tong University in Electronics and Communication Engineering. LinkedIn also shows CCIE and CBCP certifications. Official whitepaper material likewise confirms his Shanghai Jiao Tong University background in electronics and communication engineering. This makes him look like a genuine engineering-and-enterprise-IT operator rather than a pure crypto promoter. His strongest publicly verified career credential is Louis Vuitton China. Whitepaper 1.0 states that his most important role before co-founding VeChain was CIO / IS&T Director for Louis Vuitton China. Several conference bios also describe him as having spent nearly two decades as an IT executive in Fortune 500 firms. Third-party profiles often add earlier roles at Bacardi China and 3M China, but those are not laid out in the same detail in every official document, so the safest statement is that Louis Vuitton China and long Fortune 500 IT leadership are the most firmly verifiable parts of his pre-VeChain career. Sunny Lu entered blockchain through enterprise pain points, not protocol idealism. In an official VeChain article summarizing a Fenbushi interview, he explicitly argued that the industry had many technical people but too few product-minded people. He described VeChain’s philosophy as application-driven rather than technology-driven. That framing is one of the clearest windows into why VeChain was built the way it was. There were at least two major triggers behind his move into blockchain. One was his long exposure to authenticity, traceability, and trust problems in luxury and branded-product environments. The second was early exposure to Bitcoin. In a 2025 Cointelegraph profile, he discussed being scammed while trying to buy 100 BTC in 2012; rather than pushing him away from crypto, that experience deepened his interest in trust infrastructure. Sunny Lu’s actual role inside VeChain is best described as a product strategist, business architect, and chief public face. He is not primarily known for original consensus research. He is known for setting direction, reframing the narrative, pushing products into real markets, and assembling cross-industry networks. VeChain’s shift from supply chains to sustainability and then to DPP/AI-agent infrastructure still follows this same application-first logic. Jay Zhang is less visible but structurally essential. Official whitepaper material describes him as co-founder and CFO with more than 14 years of PwC and Deloitte senior-manager experience. He joined in 2015 to lead blockchain governance framework design and digital-asset management structure. In the current MiCAR record, as Jie Zhang, he is chairman and legal representative of the San Marino entity. That makes him much more than a finance manager; he is one of the core designers of VeChain’s governance, finance, and compliance backbone. Jay Zhang’s family background is also publicly limited. What can be consistently confirmed is his Shanghai Jiao Tong University education in electrical and electronic engineering and his long work in IT assurance, governance, and risk at PwC and Deloitte. Beyond that: public information is limited / cannot be confirmed for now. Brands, Assets, Capital, and Business Model VeChain’s real assets sit on four layers. The first is the VeChainThor public chain itself. The second is the VET/VTHO dual-token economic system. The third is the foundation treasury. The fourth is the product and access layer: VeWorld, VeBetter, StarGate, VeVote, VORJ, MaaS, and PoP. Current official product pages and docs make that structure explicit. Those products play different roles in a broader ecosystem design. VeWorld is the user wallet/super-app entry point; VeBetter is the consumer participation and incentive layer; StarGate is the staking/security participation layer; VeVote is the governance layer; VORJ is the no-code Web3-as-a-Service layer; MaaS is closer to a brand-facing marketplace layer; and PoP serves event verification and attendance-proof functions. They are not random additions—they help complete a wallet–incentive–governance–developer–brand-interaction loop. The treasury is one of VeChain’s most important hard assets. The official Q1 2024 Treasury Report put VeChain Foundation’s treasury at roughly $551 million at the end of Q1 2024. Later official 2024 financial reports showed the treasury’s dollar value falling with market conditions to roughly $305 million at the end of Q2 2024 and roughly $288 million at the end of Q3 2024. So VeChain is not a cashless shell, but its balance-sheet strength is still highly sensitive to crypto-market pricing. In terms of influence assets, DNV and PwC have been the two most important early institutional lines. DNV first partnered with VeChain in 2018, later acquired a minority stake, and became an Authority Masternode while jointly expanding products such as My Story. PwC served as both a client-network bridge and a legitimacy anchor in enterprise risk/compliance circles. In VeChain’s own 2021 interview summary, Sunny Lu said DNV and PwC upgraded their involvement from partners to investors. The DNV equity stake is clearly disclosed in DNV’s own announcement; PwC’s investor role is less transparently disclosed and should therefore be treated with more caution. Earlier capital support came from Fenbushi Capital and a broader advisory network. VeChain’s own 2021 article explicitly called Fenbushi an angel-round investor. Whitepaper 1.0 also listed figures such as Jim Breyer and Bo Shen in its advisory structure, showing that VeChain was embedded early in a cross-network that included Chinese blockchain capital, Silicon Valley capital, and enterprise consulting/certification circles. VeChain’s business model has never been based on fees alone. Whitepaper 2.0 explicitly listed revenue sources such as asset management and investment, consulting/development services for enterprises, professional training, and VTHO-supported service/solution packages. That means VeChain historically operated as a combination of industry enabler, protocol infrastructure provider, and treasury-backed ecosystem builder. Turning Points, Achievements, and Controversies The key turning points are easy to identify. 2015 was the project’s establishment; 2017–2018 was the move into foundation/governance/public-chain infrastructure; 2019 was the ToolChain/Walmart China platformization phase; 2021 brought the San Marino digital COVID certificate use case; 2023–2024 marked the sustainability and VeBetter pivot; and 2025–2026 brought Galactica, Hayabusa, StarGate, Rekord, and the AI/agent roadmap. VeChain’s most representative success is that it produced named, repeatable, real-world cases earlier and more persistently than most enterprise-blockchain projects. DNV’s My Story is explicitly built on VeChain’s public ledger; Walmart China’s traceability platform is cited in official case material; San Marino’s digital COVID certificate used VeChainThor for verifiable digital authenticity; and VeChain still reuses Walmart, BMW, and DNV as flagship proof points in its current materials. It is remembered less for radical theory and more for the persistence of enterprise-oriented deployment. Its biggest long-term criticism has been centralization. Official materials themselves make clear that early authority nodes were approved by the Foundation/Steering Committee, required KYC, and were not all necessarily public in identity. Messari’s 2025 research explicitly described the model as semi-centralized. This has been the most durable structural criticism of VeChain from the broader crypto world. The second major controversy is the 2019 security incident and the blocklist response. CoinDesk reported the theft of roughly 1.1 billion VET; Messari said VeChain attributed it to staff negligence and an improper wallet-creation process. VeChain’s later official financial report confirmed that token holders voted to permanently introduce a blocklist tied to the theft and permanently remove roughly 727.6 million VET from supply. Supporters see this as responsible loss containment; critics see it as proof that VeChain governance can intervene too heavily in the ledger. Today VeChain sits in a very unusual middle position. It is not a universal base-layer standard like Bitcoin or Ethereum, nor is it the hottest consumer chain of the moment. Yet it remains one of the few older public-chain projects that still combines a real legal entity, long-running enterprise case studies, a meaningful treasury, a structured product stack, and repeated narrative reinvention capacity. Official records place its headquarters in San Marino, with teams/offices across Asia, Europe, and the US; VET also remains actively traded, with CoinMarketCap showing a market cap of roughly $544 million and a rank around #80 at the time of retrieval. Sunny Lu’s current real-world position is that of an active veteran founder still directly shaping the project. He remains the CEO, public narrator, and external interface for VeChain. The official roadmap, partnership announcements, media appearances, and high-profile branding moves such as Dana White joining as advisor continue to revolve around him. VeChain has not yet become a founder-agnostic organization in the strong sense.

In-DepthMay 21, 2026

The OpenAI Empire: Ideals, Capital, Power, and the Founders Who Changed the World with AI

OpenAI did not begin as an ordinary startup, but as a nonprofit research organization with a strong public-mission narrative. It was launched in December 2015 as a nonprofit AI research company whose stated goal was to advance digital intelligence in the way most likely to benefit humanity as a whole. The launch materials publicly identified a core founding group that included Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. OpenAI also disclosed that Sam, Greg, Elon, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Peter Thiel, AWS, Infosys, and YC Research had collectively committed $1 billion in support. The real story of OpenAI is not simply that “a lab got bigger,” but that a mission-constrained organization was repeatedly reshaped by compute needs, product expansion, and capital structure. In 2019, OpenAI shifted to a capped-profit hybrid structure because frontier model development, talent competition, and supercomputing required funding on the scale of billions of dollars. In 2025 it reaffirmed that the nonprofit would retain control, while transitioning the for-profit arm into a Public Benefit Corporation. After the October 2025 recapitalization, the OpenAI Foundation held about 26% equity, Microsoft about 27%, and current/former employees plus other investors about 47%, while the Foundation retained the power to appoint and remove the for-profit board. If reduced to one sentence, OpenAI is no longer just an AI company. It is simultaneously a research lab, a mass consumer platform, an enterprise software vendor, a compute infrastructure organization, a policy actor, and a capital-intensive quasi-platform company. That position was not created by a single “genius founder” narrative, but by a combination of roles: Sam Altman as organizer, fundraiser, external operator, and political narrator; Greg Brockman as engineering systems builder and recruiter; Ilya Sutskever as scientific and safety-minded research leader; and figures like Schulman, Karpathy, Zaremba, and Kingma as builders of reinforcement learning, generative modeling, alignment, and technical systems. OpenAI’s greatest success is not merely that it produced strong models, but that it stacked frontier models, global distribution, commercialization, and public influence into one machine. In 2020 it released the API as its first commercial product and explicitly argued that commercialization would fund continued research, safety, and policy work. In November 2022 it released ChatGPT as a research preview and pushed itself from the research world into mainstream culture and everyday work. By late 2025, OpenAI said it had more than 1 million direct business customers, and by January 2026 it said ChatGPT had over 700 million weekly active users and that 2025 ARR had surpassed $20 billion. Sam Altman is the OpenAI founder most recognizable as a power integrator. Public reporting says he was born in Chicago in 1985, grew up in affluent suburban St. Louis, had a dermatologist mother and a father involved in real estate and housing issues, attended the private John Burroughs School, and got early exposure to computing through a Macintosh. He studied computer science at Stanford but left without completing the degree, founded Loopt, later sold it, moved into investing, and eventually became president of Y Combinator. That path helps explain why he differs from a purely academic founder: his strength is in combining talent, capital, narrative, and organizational scale. Greg Brockman is the clearest example of a systems builder inside OpenAI’s founding group. He grew up in North Dakota and has publicly emphasized the importance of the local community and educational flexibility that let him take large numbers of University of North Dakota classes while still in high school. In his own writing he said he seriously started programming during a gap year after reading Turing’s “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” and that he became fascinated by the idea of building code that could understand something its own author did not fully understand. He later attended Harvard and MIT without completing a degree, joined Stripe in 2010, worked deeply on backend infrastructure, became its first CTO, and then left to help form OpenAI. Ilya Sutskever was the closest thing OpenAI had to a scientific soul. Public biographical sources describe him as born in Russia, raised in Israel, captivated by computers from the age of five, and later relocated with his family to Canada. He completed his PhD at the University of Toronto, became a central co-inventor of AlexNet and sequence-to-sequence learning, worked at Google Brain, and then left Google in late 2015 to cofound OpenAI, where he served for years as chief scientist. His significance is unusual: he was both one of the hardest-core researchers of the modern deep learning era and later one of the strongest voices around superintelligence safety and alignment. Elon Musk and the broader technical cohort gave OpenAI both funding glamour and unusually high research density from the start. Musk was a co-chair and early funder but left the board in 2018 and later became adversarial. John Schulman represented the reinforcement learning and RLHF line; Andrej Karpathy embodied computer vision, deep-learning pedagogy, and later product intuition; Wojciech Zaremba represented algorithms, robotics, code models, and later resilience work; Durk Kingma represented generative-model methodology; Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, and Pamela Vagata were more closely tied to early engineering foundations, robotics, and systems building. For several of these figures, the best-documented public information concerns education and career rather than family background, so public information on private family history is limited. OpenAI’s institutional core was never simply “open source”; it was always about how to pursue AGI while claiming that mission should outrank shareholder interests. The 2018 Charter states that OpenAI’s mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, that its primary fiduciary duty is to humanity, that it is committed to long-term safety, and even that if another aligned, safety-conscious project came close to building AGI first, OpenAI would stop competing and start assisting. That Charter matters because it later became the baseline against which every commercialization and governance controversy was judged. But the Charter quickly collided with compute reality. In 2019 OpenAI said it had learned firsthand that the most dramatic AI systems required enormous computational power and that it would need to invest billions in large-scale cloud compute, talent, and AI supercomputers. Its capped-profit solution was designed so that employees and investors could receive capped returns, while value beyond the cap would flow back to the nonprofit. The nonprofit board still controlled the entity, and employees and investors formally agreed that the Charter came first, even above their financial stake. OpenAI’s business model was not a sudden betrayal of its mission; it was a progressively constructed response to frontier-scale costs. When OpenAI launched the API in 2020, it explicitly gave three reasons: commercialization funds research, safety, and policy work; APIs let smaller organizations benefit without training giant models; and APIs are easier to control than openly released weights when misuse is a concern. That logic already revealed a major shift: OpenAI was becoming a controlled deployment platform, not a purely open lab. ChatGPT’s 2022 launch then brought that platform into the consumer world. Its revenue logic is best understood as “frontier model capability × distribution × enterprise packaging × steady compute supply.” OpenAI’s own 2026 materials say its product layer spans text, images, voice, code, and APIs and is moving toward agents and workflow automation. OpenAI also says 2025 ARR exceeded $20 billion, compute capacity grew from roughly 0.2 GW in 2023 to about 1.9 GW in 2025, business customers surpassed 1 million, and ChatGPT weekly active users surpassed 700 million. By that point, OpenAI was no longer simply selling model calls; it was selling an intelligence layer increasingly embedded in both personal and organizational workflows. Microsoft is the single most important outside organization in OpenAI’s transition from lab to industrial-scale platform. In 2019 Microsoft invested $1 billion and became OpenAI’s exclusive cloud provider, with the two sides jointly developing Azure AI supercomputing technologies. In the 2025 structure, Microsoft held roughly 27% of OpenAI Group PBC, and the companies continued renegotiating key terms as OpenAI moved toward a new structure and a possible future IPO. Microsoft is therefore not just a funder, but also a compute provider, a distribution partner, and a long-term strategic counterpart. By 2025–2026, OpenAI’s assets fell into two different categories. The first are directly capitalizable assets: ChatGPT distribution, enterprise relationships, model IP, compute and chip contracts, PBC equity structure, infrastructure bets like Stargate, and hardware expansion via the Jony Ive deal. The second are influence assets: the Charter, AGI narrative authority, safety discourse, public-policy access, and regulatory visibility. The first category supports valuation; the second supports the organization’s ability to keep scaling under political and social pressure. The first decisive turning point was that OpenAI defined itself from day one as an AGI organization, not a narrow AI startup. That choice meant it would require the best researchers, huge compute, and long-duration capital from the beginning. The original launch post explicitly positioned Ilya as research director, Greg as CTO, and the broader group as world-class research engineers and scientists. This was not a conventional startup team; it was effectively a founding research institute. The second decisive turning point was the 2019 acceptance that mission would have to be amplified through capital. OpenAI LP was not a side detail; it was the most important structural break in company history. It marked the moment OpenAI stopped treating pure nonprofit research as a sustainable end-state and accepted that frontier AI competition required financing, equity incentives, and platform-scale compute. Almost every later dispute—Microsoft dependence, Musk litigation, nonprofit control, PBC conversion, IPO talk—flows from this decision. The third decisive turning point was the choice of controlled deployment over full openness. The Charter already suggested that safety and security concerns would reduce traditional publication over time, and the API page explicitly argued that API access was safer than releasing open weights. Product launches, enterprise sales, subscription tiers, and workflow integration later confirmed that OpenAI had fused safety, business, and distribution into one institutional choice. That is why “how open is OpenAI really?” has remained a persistent argument. The fourth decisive turning point was ChatGPT’s release in 2022. Its importance was not simply that a chatbot became famous, but that OpenAI gained direct user distribution, brand control, and enterprise lead generation at planetary scale. By 2025–2026, OpenAI itself described the company as simultaneously operating Research, Compute, Applications, and a very large nonprofit footprint. The addition of Fidji Simo showed that applications and execution were no longer side functions orbiting research, but pillars in their own right. The fifth decisive turning point was the 2023 board coup and the rapid reversal that followed. In November 2023, OpenAI’s board said it no longer had confidence in Sam Altman and that he had not been consistently candid in his communications. Days later, under pressure from employees, Microsoft, and investors, Altman returned, Greg Brockman returned as president, and by March 2024 a WilmerHale-backed review led the board to declare full confidence in Sam and Greg’s leadership. The long-term consequence was profound: instead of weakening Altman, the episode ultimately strengthened his position. The sixth turning point was the diaspora of founders and senior researchers. In May 2024 Ilya left OpenAI and soon launched Safe Superintelligence, explicitly stating that its only goal and product would be safe superintelligence. John Schulman left for Anthropic in 2024 and then moved to Thinking Machines in 2025 as chief scientist. Andrej Karpathy moved into Eureka Labs and then joined Anthropic’s pretraining effort in 2026. Wojciech Zaremba moved into the OpenAI Foundation’s AI Resilience work in 2026. The result is that the “OpenAI founding network” no longer exists inside one firm; it has spread across the frontier AI sector. The seventh turning point was the 2025–2026 escalation into compute and interface control. The SoftBank-led $40 billion round valued OpenAI at $300 billion; Stargate tied it to an infrastructure plan of up to $500 billion; and the $6.5 billion all-stock io deal with Jony Ive moved it beyond software and models toward the device layer. This showed that OpenAI’s ambition had expanded from model leadership to control over compute, distribution, and future AI-native hardware interfaces. The biggest controversy remains whether OpenAI betrayed its founding nonprofit mission. Musk’s legal case crystallized that accusation, claiming OpenAI, Altman, and Brockman had departed from nonprofit principles and enriched themselves through commercialization. OpenAI responded publicly that Musk had understood the need for a for-profit structure and had at one point wanted control himself. In May 2026, Musk lost in court on timeliness grounds, which gave OpenAI an important legal victory, yet Reuters also reported that the case reopened serious questions about Altman’s leadership style and credibility. Legally, OpenAI won; reputationally, it did not emerge untouched. The second major controversy is governance credibility. When Altman was removed in 2023, the public explanation was only that he had not been consistently candid with the board. By March 2024, the company had completed a review and restored confidence in him. That sharp reversal has left a durable question: was the crisis fundamentally about AI safety, leadership style, or control? Because the full internal record has never been made public, the underlying reasons remain disputed and cannot be fully verified from public sources. The third major controversy is whether safety has been subordinated to speed. In 2024 OpenAI created a Safety and Security Committee as it began training its next frontier model, yet former safety figures such as Jan Leike argued that safety culture and processes had taken a back seat to “shiny products.” So the issue is not whether safety structures exist—they do—but whether they are independent and powerful enough to constrain the pace of expansion. The fourth major controversy concerns copyright, consent, and training data. In 2025, multiple suits by authors and news organizations against OpenAI and Microsoft were consolidated in New York. In 2024, the Scarlett Johansson “Sky” voice dispute raised another kind of consent problem, after Johansson said the voice was eerily similar to hers and OpenAI paused it. Like other frontier AI labs, OpenAI does not merely face controversy; it faces controversy at a scale that turns each dispute into an industry-wide stress test. The fifth major controversy is that attrition has come to symbolize perceived value drift. As founders and top researchers moved to Anthropic, Thinking Machines, SSI, and elsewhere, critics increasingly argued that OpenAI had shifted from a research-and-safety-first lab into a product, finance, and expansion-first supercompany. That claim is not settled as fact, but it has become strong enough that every major departure revives it. At the same time, OpenAI has not completely abandoned mission constraints; it has tried to re-embed them in the new structure. Officially, the nonprofit still controls the company; the Safety and Security Committee remains at the Foundation level; Zaremba was put in charge of AI Resilience; and the Foundation said it expected to deploy at least $1 billion over the next year across life sciences, jobs and economic impact, AI resilience, and community programs. The dispute is not over whether these arrangements exist, but whether critics believe they are strong enough to counter the logic of hyper-capitalized expansion. As of 2026, OpenAI’s identity is now highly layered. Sam Altman remains CEO and says he directly oversees Research, Compute, and Applications while also working with the board on the nonprofit. Fidji Simo is being brought in to lead Applications. Greg Brockman continues as president and publicly represents the company in large infrastructure efforts. The Foundation board comprises Bret Taylor, Adam D’Angelo, Sue Desmond-Hellmann, Zico Kolter, Paul Nakasone, Adebayo Ogunlesi, Nicole Seligman, and Sam Altman. OpenAI therefore looks less like a classic startup and more like a multi-pillar super-organization coordinated by Altman. In industry terms, OpenAI remains one of the very few organizations able to combine frontier training, global user distribution, enterprise sales, and infrastructure finance at full scale. With more than 700 million weekly active users, more than 1 million business customers, more than $20 billion ARR, Stargate-level infrastructure ambitions, and a continually revised long-term relationship with Microsoft, it increasingly resembles a next-generation computing platform company rather than a conventional SaaS vendor. That is an inference, but it is a well-supported one based on public data about usage, revenue, structure, and compute strategy. Who inherits, respects, criticizes, and extends OpenAI today? Almost the entire frontier AI sector does all of those things at once. Anthropic has taken in Schulman, Karpathy, and Durk; Ilya continues the safe-superintelligence thesis through SSI; Thinking Machines built around former OpenAI talent including Schulman; the Foundation gave Zaremba a resilience role; and figures like Pamela Vagata, Vicki Cheung, and Trevor Blackwell continue to extend influence through investing, founding, and robotics. OpenAI’s deepest legacy, then, is not only what remains inside the company, but the way it has seeded a generation of frontier AI institutions. The reason the world remembers OpenAI is not only ChatGPT. More fundamentally, OpenAI fused four things that had rarely been fused inside one institution before: frontier research, commercial deployment, AGI safety language, and enormous capital-organizing capacity. Academia had the science, investors had the money, internet companies had distribution—but OpenAI brought all four into one organizational template. Even the firms that criticize it are, in different ways, building within a template it helped define. The clearest bottom-line summary is this: OpenAI was built by a coalition of researchers, systems engineers, and one especially strong capital-and-organization founder. It formed influence through frontier model capability, deep alignment with Microsoft and later capital networks, ChatGPT-scale distribution, an enterprise platform, and a persistent AGI narrative. It owns powerful brand, platform, and infrastructure assets, as well as unusually strong influence assets. Its success lies in turning AI from a research frontier into an everyday global tool; its controversy lies in mission, governance, safety, and copyright; and its real-world position is now close to that of a new general computing infrastructure. There are still hard limits in the available public record. For several lesser-known founders—especially Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Pamela Vagata, and some phases of Wojciech Zaremba’s career—public information is rich on education and work history but thin on family background, parents, and childhood resources. Those aspects therefore cannot be reconstructed with high confidence from public sources alone. Figures about valuation, future IPO, ad revenue, and 2030-scale forecasts should be handled carefully. Many of them are company statements, media reports, annualized run-rate metrics, or forward-looking investor presentations rather than audited historical accounts. They are useful for understanding direction and capital expectations, but they should not be read as fixed accounting facts. The single most important unresolved question remains the true internal cause of Altman’s 2023 removal. Public sources still do not fully unify the story of what the board knew, what evidence it had, and whether the deepest conflict was primarily about safety, candor, or control. That remains the sharpest evidentiary limit in this entire subject.

In-DepthJun 20, 2026

Masayoshi Son: From a Korean-Japanese Immigrant Youth to a Global Technology Capital Titan — The SoftBank Empire, the Alibaba Miracle, and the Great Gambler of the AI Age

Overall Positioning. Masayoshi Son is not just a conventional entrepreneur; he is better understood as a long-cycle technology bettor. SoftBank’s official director biography confirms that he founded the company in 1981 and remains its Chairman and CEO, while the group’s 2025 annual report explicitly defines SoftBank Group as a “strategic investment holding company,” not a single operating business. His core creation is therefore not one product, but a capital-and-technology machine that keeps moving from software distribution to the internet, broadband, mobile telecom, semiconductors, and now AI. SoftBank’s own historical framing is revealing. Its 2025 materials describe a continuous path: software distribution in 1981, the internet in the 1990s, Yahoo! BB broadband in 2001, Vodafone Japan and mobile telecom in 2006, Arm in 2016, Vision Fund in 2017, and Stargate plus OpenAI collaboration in 2025. That sequence shows that Son’s method is not industry-specific. He tries to stand at the gateway of the next layer of infrastructure before it becomes obvious to everyone else. His importance lies in changing both the risk appetite of Japanese business and the scale of global startup finance. SoftBank describes its approach as a “Cluster of No.1 Strategy,” building ecosystems around leading or potentially category-defining companies. The 2025 report says this ecosystem includes Arm, directly held investments, and more than 400 portfolio companies across the Vision Funds and other funds. His real contribution is not merely wealth creation, but an operating model that combines control stakes, venture investing, acquisitions, leverage, public-market assets, sovereign capital, and founder networks. Family Background and Education. Official company material confirms Son’s birth date as August 11, 1957. Serious English-language sources broadly agree that he was born in Saga Prefecture, Kyushu, to a family of ethnic Koreans living in Japan. Britannica, Time, and the Financial Times all stress that discrimination shaped his early life and helped form the intense ambition that later defined him. More granular birthplace descriptions appear in secondary sources, but the official board biography does not go beyond the prefecture level. His family was not part of Japan’s traditional elite. Time and the FT both describe a household that survived through marginal and opportunistic businesses. Their reporting overlaps on the broad outline: the family lived in poor conditions, used the Japanese surname Yasumoto for social survival, and his father engaged in activities such as bootleg sake, pig farming, lending, and pachinko-related business. Public English-language information on his mother’s detailed background is limited. Two forces shaped him early. One was the pressure of discrimination, which made the United States look like an escape route. The other was growing up around improvised commerce, bargaining, and survival economics. Those early influences help explain why Son later became willing to make outsized bets on Yahoo, Alibaba, Arm, and OpenAI. The most important mentor in his formative years was Den Fujita, the famed McDonald’s Japan executive. Britannica records that Son repeatedly tried to meet Fujita in the 1970s, and when the meeting finally happened, Fujita advised him to pursue computing and study in the United States. That advice effectively redirected Son’s life. Son graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980 with a degree in economics. What matters more than the formal major is what he did while there: Britannica says he and collaborators developed a sound-translation device that converted Japanese into English and German, sold it to Sharp, and used the proceeds to fund the business that became SoftBank. The FT adds that California exposed him directly to the PC revolution and to the stories of Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. From Founding to Expansion. Son’s first truly representative professional move was not joining an established corporation but founding one himself. SoftBank’s official history says that in September 1981 he created Nihon SoftBank to distribute packaged PC software. The official brand page explains the company name directly: “Soft” came from software, and “Bank” reflected his ambition to become a key source of infrastructure for the information society. He then entered publishing in 1982 with Oh! PC and Oh! MZ. SoftBank’s own history stresses that these magazines targeted engineers and manufacturers rather than mass consumers. That matters because it shows Son was trying to control technical information flows and software distribution layers before he ever controlled consumer brands. In the 1990s, he upgraded from distribution logic to platform logic. SoftBank’s 2025 annual report says the group set up SoftBank Holdings in the United States for strategic internet investment in 1994, and launched Yahoo! JAPAN in 1996. He was not waiting for Japan’s internet sector to mature on its own; he was plugging into the U.S. internet wave early, then transplanting that platform play into Japan. One of the most consequential investments of his career was Alibaba. SoftBank’s official history and annual report both list the 2000 Alibaba investment as a defining milestone. That investment later became one of the greatest value-creation events in SoftBank’s history and elevated Son from a Japanese entrepreneur to a major global technology financier. The exact folklore around how quickly he committed is often narrated in legendary terms, but the core fact is not in doubt. He then moved from internet access points to national network infrastructure. SoftBank’s history page records Yahoo! BB in 2001 and the acquisition of Japan Telecom in 2004, marking the move into fixed-line telecommunications. This was not simply a content or portal strategy. It was an attempt to own the pipes through which the information revolution would run. The 2006 acquisition of Vodafone K.K. was one of the defining gambles of his life. SoftBank’s acquisition release said it would transform the group into an integrated fixed-and-mobile telecom operator with roughly 26 million service lines and about 2.5 trillion yen in annual consolidated revenue. In his 2025 CEO message, Son later summarized the result more bluntly: after acquiring Vodafone’s Japan arm, they helped bring the iPhone to Japan. The famous story that Son secured an informal understanding with Steve Jobs on Japanese iPhone exclusivity before SoftBank even owned a mobile carrier has been retold in later biographies and was summarized by Wired. It fits Son’s style perfectly and has become part of the public mythology around him. But it should still be treated carefully: it is widely circulated, yet hard to verify independently beyond Son’s own retelling and later biographical reconstruction. In 2013, Son took the telecom play to the United States through Sprint. In 2020, after Sprint’s merger with T-Mobile, Sprint ceased to be a SoftBank consolidated subsidiary. SoftBank’s own timeline and Reuters’ T-Mobile history both show that this chapter reflected Son’s effort to export the scale logic of telecom consolidation into the U.S. market, with far more regulatory and competitive friction than in Japan. The 2016 acquisition of Arm marked his shift from connectivity toward compute. Reuters reported the price at $32 billion and framed it at the time as another “crazy idea.” With hindsight, it looks like one of his most prescient decisions. SoftBank’s 2025 report states that by the end of June 2025, more than 325 billion Arm-based chips had been shipped globally across phones, PCs, cars, IoT, and cloud computing. In 2017, Son institutionalized his gambling instinct through the Vision Fund. In later years, he extended the system through Latin America exposure, Graphcore, Ampere, OpenAI, and Stargate. By that point he was no longer merely investing in companies; he was trying to control the full strategic stack from chip design to AI infrastructure, enterprise distribution, and state-level financing relationships. Capital Networks and Business Model. Son’s commercial model has never depended on one operating business throwing off cash. It depends on asset appreciation, exits, refinancing, and redeployment of capital. SoftBank’s 2025 report describes three capital inputs: the ecosystem of portfolio companies, financial capital, and human capital. It also says the group invests in companies with AI-driven growth potential while often respecting founder autonomy rather than insisting on majority control. The Vision Fund is the clearest institutional expression of that model. The official PIF and SoftBank announcements show a 2016 memorandum to build what could become a $100 billion technology fund, followed by a 2017 first major close above $93 billion. PIF committed up to $45 billion, SoftBank up to $28 billion, and Mubadala, Apple, Foxconn, Qualcomm, and Sharp also joined. This matters because Son was not betting only with his own capital. He was assembling sovereign wealth, corporate capital, and SoftBank’s own resources into one giant war chest. Management structure also mattered. PIF’s official release says Rajeev Misra was the founding CEO of SB Investment Advisers and a member of the investment committee. By 2025, SoftBank’s annual report and the Vision Fund’s own team page showed Alex Clavel as CEO of SoftBank Investment Advisers, while Reuters reported in 2026 that long-time Vision Fund CFO Navneet Govil was leaving and that Rajeev Misra had already stepped back from a frontline role earlier. Vision Fund 2 revealed the other side of Son’s model: when external LP confidence weakens, he is willing to finance the machine himself. Reuters reported in 2020 that SoftBank began seeding the second fund with its own cash, and in 2021 Reuters said SoftBank was the only investor in Vision Fund 2. That says a great deal about the post-WeWork credibility gap, but also about Son’s refusal to slow down. The assets deeply tied to Son can be divided into hard assets and influence assets. Hard assets include SoftBank Group, SoftBank Corp., Arm, Vision Fund holdings, and later AI or semiconductor assets such as Graphcore and Ampere. Influence assets include the SoftBank brand itself, his ability to work with sovereign funds, his ties to figures such as Sam Altman and Jack Ma, and institutions like the Masason Foundation. The first category appears in NAV and equity values. The second determines whether he gets a seat at the next major negotiating table. Son especially likes to define success in terms of NAV. In his 2025 CEO message, he said SoftBank’s NAV as of June 26, 2025 was about 31 trillion yen, while its market capitalization was about 14 trillion yen. In his framing, the stock price matters, but the real task is to accumulate scarce, infrastructure-like assets first and let the market eventually re-rate them. That helps explain why SoftBank often looks levered, opaque, and difficult to value, yet still retains the ability to keep making giant bets. By 2025–2026, the model moved again—from “investing in AI companies” to “owning AI control points.” SoftBank and OpenAI announced in February 2025 that they would develop and market “Cristal intelligence,” with SoftBank Group spending $3 billion annually to deploy OpenAI solutions across its group and jointly establishing SB OpenAI Japan for enterprise sales in Japan. Just before that, Stargate was announced as a plan to invest $500 billion over four years in AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States, with SoftBank taking financial responsibility and Son serving as chairman. In 2026 this evolved into full-scale infrastructure finance. SoftBank’s official documents said it had invested an aggregate of $34.6 billion in OpenAI since September 2024 and planned another $30 billion in follow-on investment. Reuters reported in March 2026 that SoftBank secured a $40 billion bridge loan to support OpenAI-related financing, and by May 2026 Reuters said the total OpenAI plan had risen to $64.6 billion for roughly a 13% stake. That is no longer traditional venture capital. It resembles infrastructure finance attached to AI. Key Decisions, Successes, and Criticisms. Son’s most important decisions can be reduced to a few major turns: following Fujita’s advice and going to the U.S.; founding his own company in 1981; leaning into internet platforms through Yahoo and Yahoo! JAPAN; backing Alibaba in 2000; buying Vodafone Japan in 2006 to seize the mobile gateway; buying Arm in 2016; and then returning aggressively to AI through OpenAI and Stargate in 2025–2026. Together these moves reveal a pattern: he tries to position himself where the next infrastructure layer is about to form. His greatest achievements are not best measured by one operating business. SoftBank grew from a 1981 software distributor into a strategic investment group with a reported NAV of about 31 trillion yen. Arm became its foundational AI-age semiconductor asset. Alibaba delivered one of the biggest wealth-creation events in the group’s history. Vision Fund changed the scale and tempo of startup financing globally. Even those who dislike Son’s style have difficulty denying that he rewrote the norms of technology capital. The world remembers him because he repeatedly puts down far larger chips than others are willing to at the same moment in the cycle. Reuters and Time both portray him as bold, controversial, capable of huge mistakes, and capable of returning after those mistakes. He is not famous for being right all the time. He is famous for making oversized, thesis-driven bets and accepting extreme volatility. His failures have been equally large. The most famous is WeWork. Reuters reported in 2019 that SoftBank posted its first quarterly loss in 14 years as the Vision Fund was hit by revaluations, and that the WeWork crisis forced SoftBank into a rescue involving more than $10 billion. Son admitted at the time that his judgment on WeWork had been wrong “in many ways.” This was not merely a financial blow. It damaged his reputation for judgment. A second major blow came in 2022. Reuters reported that the Vision Fund posted a record annual loss of $26.2 billion, or about 3.5 trillion yen, and Son said the group would shift into “defense mode.” That episode showed how vulnerable his concentrated growth-stock model was once rates rose, valuations compressed, and parts of the China and late-stage growth universe weakened sharply. The controversies extend beyond WeWork. Reuters Breakingviews later listed WeWork and Greensill together as major lows in Son’s career, and Reuters in 2025 reported a $440 million London lawsuit tied to Greensill and Katerra losses. Reuters also described how SoftBank’s Wirecard exposure was structured through a highly complex convertible-bond arrangement. None of these facts automatically make Son personally guilty of misconduct, but together they reinforce the market perception that his capital structures tend to operate near the edge of what investors can comfortably evaluate. Governance criticism has also been explicit. Reuters reported in 2024 that support for Son’s reappointment fell to 79.22% from 95.93% the previous year after ISS opposed him partly because the company’s average return on equity had been below 5% over the prior five years. That matters because it shows that even with Arm and AI helping sentiment, some institutional investors still question governance quality and capital efficiency. Even his origin story contains shadows. The FT interviewed Berkeley-era collaborator Forrest Mozer, who accused Son of lying and cheating him in their first business deal; Son rejected that account and said he had wrongly assumed he had permission. The precise moral reading remains disputed, but the episode is revealing. The Son narrative has always contained both the “visionary entrepreneur” and the “extreme dealmaker.” By 2026, Son stood once again at the center of a new controversy: whether he is repeating the correct strategic direction with excessive leverage. Reuters argued in 2026 that SoftBank had become a critical financial backer of OpenAI while also becoming one of the more fragile links in the AI financing chain, because continuing the strategy requires asset sales, loans, margin structures, and new borrowing. If OpenAI, Stargate, or later AI exits disappoint, the pressure returns quickly to SoftBank’s own balance sheet. Current Status and Real-World Influence. As of the latest publicly verifiable information, Son remains Chairman and CEO of SoftBank Group and Chairman of Arm. Official corporate materials confirm he remains at the center of the group’s power structure, and in 2025 he publicly declared that he wants SoftBank to become the number one platform provider in the age of artificial superintelligence. He is not in a preservation phase. He is back in attack mode. His current activity is overwhelmingly focused on AI infrastructure. SoftBank’s OpenAI collaboration spans SB OpenAI Japan, large-scale internal deployment of Cristal intelligence, Stargate in the United States, and continued OpenAI investment. At the same time, SoftBank has acquired Graphcore and Ampere and in 2026 launched an OpenAI-based cybersecurity product for critical infrastructure. These moves show that Son no longer wants to be merely an investor in AI companies. He wants to organize the financing and infrastructure of the AI era itself. In terms of real influence, the most important thing about Son today is not a static label such as “one of Japan’s richest men.” It is that he is one of the few actors in the AI capital-expenditure race who simultaneously controls chip assets, financing capacity, and a direct strategic relationship with OpenAI. Reuters in 2026 essentially described SoftBank as one of the indispensable financial pillars behind OpenAI. If you want to understand the AI buildout race of 2025–2026, Son is unavoidable. His legacy now exists on at least four layers. First, in Japan’s broadband and mobile internet history through Yahoo! BB and the Vodafone Japan/SoftBank Mobile transformation. Second, in global technology investment history through Alibaba, Arm, and the Vision Fund. Third, in the emerging history of AI infrastructure through Stargate, OpenAI, Ampere, and Graphcore. Fourth, in philanthropy and talent development: after the 2011 earthquake he personally donated 10 billion yen, and in 2016 he established the Masason Foundation to support high-potential youth. Who inherits him, and who criticizes him? He is inherited by people who want to connect technological trend-spotting with balance-sheet ambition and even state-level capital. He is criticized by those who focus on valuation inflation, concentration risk, and leverage. That is why Son remains an unfinished figure. If AI develops along the lines he imagines, he may again be remembered as ahead of the market. If not, he may again be remembered as the man who pushed a powerful technological narrative too far, with too much borrowed force.

NewsApr 22, 2026

OpenAI to Increase Computing Power from 10GW to 30GW by 2030

... center and hardware deployment capacity, stemming from the Stargate program and collaborations with partners like NVIDIA and Broadcom. The company disclosed that since 2023, its internally available computing power has ...