OpenAI: Banks ‘working to lend 38bn USD to ChatGPT maker to fuel company’s AI ambitions’
Banks are reportedly in talks to provide OpenAI with a fresh $38 billion in financing, underscoring the massive capital required to sustain the company’s rapidly expanding AI infrastructure.
Several major banks are reportedly in talks to lend $38 billion to support the infrastructure build-out powering OpenAI’s breakneck expansion.
According to a report from the Financial Times, the funds would flow through Oracle and data centre operator Vantage, which are racing to construct the massive compute sites OpenAI needs to sustain ChatGPT’s growth and next-generation models.
The loan would be one of the largest private credit efforts ever attempted in the tech sector.
The talks underscore a mounting concern across financial markets, as OpenAI’s meteoric rise is colliding with the staggering cost of scaling artificial intelligence.
Despite its global dominance and explosive user growth, OpenAI remains unprofitable and, per new HSBC analysis, may not reach profitability before 2030.
By that point, HSBC projects that 44 per cent of the world’s adult population will use OpenAI products - up from 10 per cent today - but the operations behind that growth will still require a historic level of capital.
HSBC estimates OpenAI faces a $207 billion funding shortfall to achieve its compute ambitions through the end of the decade, driven by colossal infrastructure commitments, including a $250 billion cloud deal with Microsoft and a $38 billion agreement with Amazon.
The company is targeting 36 gigawatts of compute capacity, roughly the electricity demand of a small US state.
The scale of required hardware, energy, and data-centre construction is so vast that the FT likened OpenAI to “a money pit with a website on top”.
Yet investors remain captivated, convinced that AI remains a megacycle, one that could transform productivity, reshape industries, and justify today’s unprecedented capital burn.
