OpenAI’s Latest Mega-Fundraise, Big Tech Earnings Week, Amazon Layoffs?
Here's the latest edition of our Big Technology Agenda Setter email, coming your way most Mondays. We share what you need to know for the week ahead:
Sam Altman is fundraising again and the next round could be historic. The OpenAI CEO is reportedly in early talks with Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds about raising $50 billion, a round that could give his company a valuation between $750 billion and $850 billion and eclipse its own record-setting $40 billion SoftBank investment fulfilled just a month ago.
Nobody will doubt Altman’s prolific ability to raise money, but as he adds further billions, two main questions will hang over the company: 1) How many more times can OpenAI secure funding rounds of this magnitude? 2) Can OpenAI live up to the expectations it’s setting for itself?
In recent fundraising rounds, Altman’s climbed the ladder from VCs to mega-funders like Softbank and now he’s eyeing sovereign wealth funds like Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. If this $50 billion is the first of many mega-rounds from the Gulf States, OpenAI can keep losing money and push ahead with its ambitious agenda. But for every unprecedented fundraise, there’s no guarantee another will follow. Eventually, an IPO will be left, subjecting OpenAI’s numbers to public market scrutiny.
Like most pre-IPO tech companies, OpenAI still isn’t profitable. But the company’s given the public some reason to believe it has a formula for predictable revenue growth. In a blog post last week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said annual recurring revenue has climbed from $2 billion in 2023 to $6 billion in 2024 to $20 billion in 2025. She noted compute and revenue have had similar growth curves, with both growing roughly 3x per year between 2023 and 2025. And she thinks growth could’ve been even faster. “We firmly believe that more compute in these periods would have led to faster customer adoption and monetization,” she wrote.
That’s likely the story OpenAI is telling investors. It’s a simple pitch: “Your cash turns into compute turns into revenue.” And so far, it’s working.
Last week, as OpenAI rivals Google DeepMind and Anthropic made headlines at Davos, some wondered about Altman’s relatively quiet public-facing start to 2026. Behind the scenes though, he and his company have been working to accumulate a vast pile of cash to keep pace in an intensifying AI race. We’ll likely learn more this week.
A Walk Toward Wall Street: Preview of Earnings This Week
Big Tech earnings get underway in earnest his week. We’re expecting reports from a range of major players across the consumer, enterprise, infrastructure, and financial sectors. Including:
Wednesday: Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, IBM
Thursday: Intel, Apple, SAP
Friday: Verizon, Amex
Amazon’s Looming Layoffs?
Amazon is in the process of cutting tens of thousands from its workforce and this week could be the latest mass layoff, according to reports. Reuters says a layoff in the range of 14,000 might be coming this week, with AWS, retail, Prime Video, and more likely to be impacted.
Amazon overhired during the pandemic and is still trying to get to get its management layers and bureaucracy under control. Some will spin the cuts as AI-related, but the technology is not taking these jobs.
Amazon’s workforce typically operates with some level of paranoia due to the company’s intense culture, but these routine, massive cuts are taking that anxiety to the next level. For the sake of company morale, these cuts (should they go through) will hopefully be the last for a while.
How More AI Makes AI-Generated Code More Reliable (sponsor)
Your first AI crisis won’t be that you built too little. It will be that you can’t safely run what you’ve already shipped.
That code from Claude is about to hit prod, so engineering teams at companies like Coinbase, DoorDash, and Zscaler leverage AI to manage, run, and optimize their production systems before AI-generated code creates alerts, incidents, and business-scale operational hazards.
Meanwhile, in Washington…
Wednesday will be a busy day in Washington, D.C. In Congress the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee will have a hearing about the impact of ticket sales and bot resales. Industry experts testifying include Kid Rock, the exec director of the Ticket Policy Forum, and Live Nation’s EVP of corporate and regulatory affairs. Other past AI-related hearings the committee has held this month have addressed other issues like the use of AI in toys and claims that AI could be a “greater risk to children than social media.”
Also on Wednesday, the FTC is convening a workshop focused on age verification, which will include speakers including experts from the FTC, UK’s ICO, future of privacy forum, Cato Institute, Meta, Google, App Association, Apple, various state experts. Just last week, OpenAI announced it’s rolling out a new age prediction tool for ChatGPT and before that teamed up earlier this month with Common Sense Media to support a California ballot initiative that could let CA voters decide on some new rules for AI chatbots.
For Your Listening Pleasure: The Latest From Big Technology Podcast
We had a packed week of Big Technology Podcast episodes last week during Davos, where we recorded five interviews from the Qualcomm House:
Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon spoke with Big Technology about his vision for AI as it moves from the cloud to the edge. We covered the future of smart glasses, AI PCs, robotics and why Qualcomm is expanding into the data centers.
Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis outlined his vision for AGI and the evolution from relying on language models toward world models. We also talked about what it’ll take to develop universal assistants, the future of AI-powered science, and why he doesn’t see any need to rush into bringing ads to Gemini.
Ranjan Roy from the Margins joins us for a recap about Davos trends, OpenAI’s massive fundraise, the future of ads in chatbots, and Apple’s potential AI-powered wearables.
You can listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast app of choice
Rearview Mirror: Last week’s news, stats, research and reports
TikTok U.S. entered a new era under a new joint-venture structure backed by Oracle, Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi–based MGX. In addition to TikTok veteran Adam Presser becoming CEO, it’ll also have a new board that includes TikTok global CEO Shou Zi Chew and execs from companies investing in the deal.
The AI video company Runway created a “Turing Reel,” which involved having 1,000 people look at two of the same video frames and guessing which one is fake. (More than 90% of participants couldn’t accurately distinguish outputs from Gen-4.5 outputs vs outputs from real video.)
The “AI Overwatch Act” advanced out of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, moving Congress closer to asserting direct oversight over U.S. exports of advanced AI chips. (It also could potentially give lawmakers veto power over decisions traditionally left to the White House.)
Other headlines from last week:
OpenAI freaked out the software industry. Now, it’s Anthropic’s turn (Business Insider)
Job Applicants Sue to Open ‘Black Box’ of A.I. Hiring Decisions (NYT)
AI Alibaba Is Said to Plan IPO for AI Chipmaking Unit T-Head A T-Head chip (Bloomberg)
Florida Senate advances AI ‘bill of rights’ regulating chatbots (Politico)
How Claude Code Is Reshaping Software—and Anthropic (Wired)
PwC’s annual global survey of nearly 4,500 CEOs found that just 30% said AI helped increase revenue last year, but 56% saw neither revenue nor savings.
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