Seems ominous that Microsoft—who has been OpenAI’s closest partner, gets revenue from it, and presumably knows the most about its financial situation—ultimately chose not to invest in this latest round 👀

How did Sam pull it off? Well, he knew that hyperscalers need to show impressive RPO to investors to justify their capex estimates, and he knew that Nvidia needs the “Beat and Raise” cycle to keep going. So starting heavily in Q3 2025, he began throwing dozens of non-binding commitments to all these companies worth up to $1.4 trillion in total. They were all happy to take these commitments, not asking too many questions about where the money would actually come from, because it’s OpenAI. They will always get investors, right? And while it did not concern these companies at first, because they needed it, it started to concern public investors in Q4 when OpenAI did it a little too much. And now there is no going back. So what do you do? Everyone depends on OpenAI now, and they have to honor these commitments to show investors and Wall Street that these numbers are real.