OpenAI reportedly prepares for IPO by end of 2026

OpenAI shifts focus to enterprise as it prepares for a possible IPO.

CNBC reported the company was focusing staff and investor attention on serving businesses and high-productivity use cases ahead of a market debut that could come as soon as Q4, according to a person familiar with the matter, though that timing is subject to change.

Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, told employees in an all-hands that the company is “orienting aggressively” toward high-productivity use cases, according to a partial transcript reviewed by CNBC.

OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022 and the chatbot now supports more than 900 million weekly active users, CNBC reported.

CFO Sarah Friar hired Ajmere Dale and Cynthia Gaylor to build out the finance team; Gaylor will oversee investor relations ahead of a public listing, CNBC said.

The company told investors it is targeting roughly US$600 billion in total compute spend by 2030 and is projecting more than US$280 billion in revenue that year, CNBC reported.

CNBC also said OpenAI declared a December “code red” to improve ChatGPT amid competition from Google and Anthropic, temporarily pulling back on other investments in areas like health, shopping, and ads.

🔗 Source: CNBC

🧠 Food for thought

Implications, context, and why it matters.

The enterprise pivot comes from a push for steadier margins

Traditional software firms aim for 75-80% gross margins, while fast-growing AI companies average about 25% and some lose money 1.
Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot reportedly lost about $20 per user per month in early 2023, with heavy users running up to $80 in monthly expense 1.
OpenAI lifted its compute margin (the gap between what it charges for AI services and what it pays for the computing power to run them) for paid products from about 35% in January 2024 to 70% by October 2025, The Information reported 2.
A FedRAMP-authorized (a U.S. government security certification for cloud services) Core ChatGPT Enterprise is sold for U.S. government procurement through GSA OneGov (a U.S. General Services Administration purchasing program). It offers U.S.-only data residency plus granular administrative controls 3.

The ‘AI tax’ is reshaping software pricing and product choices

Inference costs (the computing required to generate an AI model’s answers) squeeze margins across software, creating an “AI tax” that hits even companies that did not start with AI 1.
As foundational models improve, application-layer software companies often move to more capable models to stay competitive, which can trade margin for performance 1.
Some teams build proprietary models, a route that one analysis said required AI coding assistant Cursor to raise $3.5 billion in total funding 1.
Many others send simple requests to cheaper models and switch from flat subscriptions to usage-based pricing so costs track consumption 1.