OpenAI wants to go public. Its own balance sheet of relationships might get in the way. The Information reports that the company’s dense web of business ties, the deals knitting it to Microsoft, Nvidia, Amazon, Oracle, and AMD, could complicate a path to the IPO that investors have been waiting on for years.
Here’s why that matters. When OpenAI raises money from a vendor and then turns around and spends that money buying the vendor’s chips or cloud capacity, you get what analysts now call a circular deal. The cash makes a loop. Nvidia funds OpenAI, OpenAI buys Nvidia GPUs. Amazon and Oracle commit billions in cloud, OpenAI commits billions back in spending. Each leg looks like growth. Together they can look like a company inflating its own demand.
What the numbers show
The scale is the part that stops you. OpenAI has committed to roughly $1.4 trillion in spending on compute, power, and infrastructure, against just over $20 billion in annualized revenue, according to figures cited across recent market coverage. That gap is the whole story. An IPO forces a company to open its books to the SEC and to public shareholders, and a structure that leans on vendor financing reads very differently under that light than it does in a private round.
Watch what the insiders are already doing. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang pointed to the coming IPOs of both OpenAI and Anthropic as his reason for winding down equity stakes in them. Read that as a signal. The people closest to these deals want clean distance before the filings land, because regulators at the SEC and the European Commission are looking hard at whether circular financing masks the real shape of demand.
Why this is happening now
Three forces are colliding at once:
- Capital intensity. Building frontier models costs more than any single company can self-fund, so vendors became investors. That solved the cash problem and created the entanglement problem.
- The IPO clock. Private markets tolerate complexity. Public markets price it as risk. Moving from one to the other turns a clever structure into a disclosure headache.
- Regulatory attention. Watchdogs that ignored AI plumbing two years ago now treat these loops as a potential accounting and competition issue.
What stands out here is that none of this means OpenAI is failing. Demand for its products is real. The concern is narrower and sharper: circular deals create skewed incentives, and if AI demand ever cools below today’s expectations, those same loops magnify the losses instead of cushioning them.
Where this goes by 2027
Project this forward a year or two. Expect OpenAI to spend the run-up to any filing untangling the most obvious loops, restructuring vendor agreements so they look less like self-dealing and more like ordinary commercial contracts. Expect more vendors to follow Nvidia and convert equity stakes into plain supplier relationships. And expect the first real public valuation to hinge less on model benchmarks and more on whether auditors can show the revenue stands on its own.
If the loops hold up to scrutiny, OpenAI sets the template every AI lab copies into its own IPO. If they don’t, the whole sector’s financing playbook gets repriced at once.
Practical takeaways:
- If you invest or plan to: treat headline AI revenue with suspicion until you know how much comes from partners who are also funders. Ask who pays whom, and in which direction.
- If you run an AI business: keep your customer revenue and your investor capital in separate, defensible buckets. The cleaner that line, the easier your own future raise or exit.
- If you build on OpenAI: nothing breaks tomorrow, but pricing and terms can shift fast when a vendor restructures ahead of a filing. Avoid betting your margins on today’s deal staying frozen.
The IPO everyone wants is also the audit nobody in this web has faced yet. Full reporting is at The Information.