OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar pushes IPO delay to 2027, cites $600B spending risk, revenue shortfalls

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has privately advocated delaying the company's initial public offering to 2027, cautioning that OpenAI is not yet ready to meet rigorous public reporting standards and faces significant financial headwinds. Friar's push to pump the brakes clashes with CEO Sam Altman, who has aggressively pursued a late-2026 listing, creating visible tension over IPO timing that has become Silicon Valley's most consequential internal debate.

The core concern is OpenAI's approximately $600 billion in committed future spending on data center infrastructure and computing capacity alongside slowing revenue growth. Friar has flagged to colleagues that if revenue growth does not accelerate, these capital commitments could strain the company's balance sheet precisely when it needs to present itself as investment-grade to public markets. Reports indicate OpenAI missed multiple internal revenue targets through 2026 and failed to reach its 1 billion weekly active user goal for ChatGPT.

OpenAI officially filed a confidential S-1 with the SEC on June 8, but the company stated that timing remains undecided and "it may be a while." Markets have priced in skepticism: prediction markets show roughly 30–40% odds of no OpenAI IPO by end-2026, with probability-weighted consensus shifting toward March 2027. The filing puts OpenAI behind rival Anthropic (which filed publicly June 1) in the race to define frontier lab IPO terms.

For architects and investors, the delay signals a structural issue in frontier AI economics: even OpenAI's $25 billion annual revenue may not grow fast enough to support the $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments Altman outlined. A 2027 IPO buys time for revenue acceleration (internal targets aim for $62 billion by mid-2027) and gives the competitive landscape time to settle as Anthropic, Google, and xAI deploy newer models. The bet is that going slower reduces the risk of a post-IPO stock slide if growth disappoints.