OpenAI CFO says may raise capital

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said the company may need to raise more money even after a recent record private fundraising, as the ChatGPT maker tries to secure enough computing power for rising demand. Friar made the comment in remarks reported May 16 by the Lake County Record-Bee, which cited an interview carried by Bloomberg. The comments add to a growing list of signals from OpenAI and its backers that access to chips, data centers and related infrastructure remains a central constraint on growth. (record-bee.com) OpenAI has said previous fundraising would help it scale compute infrastructure, but Friar’s remarks indicate that may not be enough. (group.softbank) ### What exactly did Sarah Friar say? Sarah Friar said OpenAI “may raise more capital” as the company faces a deepening compute crunch, according to the May 16 Record-Bee report citing Bloomberg. The report said Friar made the remark even after OpenAI completed what she described as the largest private fundraising round ever. Bloomberg’s report said the issue is not simply cash on hand, but the need to keep securing computing power as demand for artificial intelligence services rises. (record-bee.com) Friar’s comments were framed around OpenAI’s effort to match user demand with the hardware capacity needed to run and train models. ### How much money has OpenAI already raised? OpenAI said on March 31, 2025 that it had raised $40 billion at a $300 billion post-money valuation. The company said that funding would help it “scale our compute infrastructure” and support products used by 500 million people on ChatGPT each week. (record-bee.com) SoftBank Group said on February 27, 2026 that it had entered a definitive agreement to invest another $30 billion in OpenAI through SoftBank Vision Fund 2. SoftBank said its cumulative investment in OpenAI was expected to total $64.6 billion, representing an ownership interest of about 13%. (bloomberg.com) Bloomberg reported on March 31, 2026 that OpenAI completed a $122 billion fundraising round at an $852 billion valuation. That report described the deal as OpenAI’s largest funding round to date and said it would bolster spending on chips, data centers and talent. (openai.com) ### Why does compute keep coming up in OpenAI fundraising? OpenAI said in its March 2025 funding announcement that new capital would be used in part to scale compute infrastructure. That language tied fundraising directly to the cost of serving and improving its models. (group.softbank) The Record-Bee and Bloomberg reports said Friar linked any future fundraising to the company’s need for more computing power. In practice, that means the cost of chips, data-center capacity and the infrastructure needed to train and run large AI models remains high enough that even very large private rounds may not settle the issue. (bloomberg.com) That framing comes from Friar’s remarks and the reports describing them. ### What company is investors are actually funding now? SoftBank’s February 27 filing identified the investment target as OpenAI Group PBC, the public benefit corporation that operates OpenAI’s business. (openai.com) The filing said OpenAI had reorganized into that structure in October 2025. OpenAI’s own structure page says the for-profit business is now a public benefit corporation called OpenAI Group PBC, while the OpenAI Foundation continues to control the group. That matters for investors because the fundraising described by SoftBank applies to the restructured entity, not the older capped-profit setup that had defined OpenAI’s earlier years. (record-bee.com) ### What should readers watch next? July 1, 2026 is the next scheduled closing date for SoftBank’s second tranche of its follow-on OpenAI investment, according to SoftBank’s filing. (group.softbank) The third tranche is scheduled for October 1, 2026. Any new OpenAI capital raise would likely be measured against those dates, Friar’s comments on compute demand, and the company’s stated need to keep expanding infrastructure for ChatGPT and related models. OpenAI has not announced a new financing round since Friar’s remarks reported on May 16. (openai.com) (record-bee.com) (group.softbank)