OpenAI valuation and strategy shift

OpenAI’s reported $852 billion valuation is facing pushback from some of its own investors as the company shifts harder toward enterprise customers. (finance.yahoo.com) Reuters, citing the Financial Times on April 14, said some backers worry the strategy change could leave OpenAI more exposed to Anthropic and Google while it prepares for a possible initial public offering as early as 2026. (finance.yahoo.com) The valuation questions come weeks after OpenAI closed a $40 billion funding round at a $300 billion valuation on March 31, 2025, led by SoftBank with $30 billion and a syndicate contributing $10 billion. OpenAI said then that it expected revenue to triple to $12.7 billion in 2025. (cnbc.com) SoftBank said on February 27, 2026 that it agreed to invest another $30 billion in OpenAI at a $730 billion pre-money valuation, in three $10 billion tranches scheduled for April 1, July 1 and October 1, 2026. SoftBank said its cumulative OpenAI investment would reach $64.6 billion for an ownership stake of about 13%. (group.softbank) At the same time, OpenAI is trying to rebalance the partnerships that helped build it. CNBC reported on April 13 that revenue chief Denise Dresser told staff in a memo that Amazon would be a key route to winning more enterprise customers. (cnbc.com) Dresser wrote that Microsoft had been “foundational” but had also limited OpenAI’s ability to reach companies that buy artificial intelligence tools through Amazon Web Services’ Bedrock platform. She said customer demand since the late-February Amazon partnership announcement had been “staggering.” (cnbc.com) That push is tied to where the money is. Dresser told CNBC earlier in April that enterprise sales account for 40% of OpenAI revenue and are on track to reach parity with the consumer business by the end of 2026. (cnbc.com) OpenAI is also pulling back on part of its infrastructure buildout. On April 9, CNBC reported the company had paused its Stargate project in the United Kingdom, citing energy prices and the regulatory environment. (cnbc.com) The United Kingdom project, announced in September with Nvidia and Nscale, was meant to deploy up to 8,000 graphics processing units at first and potentially scale to 31,000 over time. OpenAI said it would revisit the plan when regulation and electricity costs support “long-term infrastructure investment.” (cnbc.com) For investors, the picture is getting sharper: OpenAI is spending heavily on computing, steering toward enterprise contracts, and loosening its dependence on Microsoft even as it races toward a possible stock market debut. (finance.yahoo.com)