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The ChatGPT maker plans to burn though $115 billion by 2029. No company in history has ever lit that much money on fire intentionally, let alone tried funding such a splurge through private markets alone.
There’s a playbook in Silicon Valley: raise some money; build something people want; raise a lot more money; burn it in the pursuit of growth. The core of this strategy is to swap money for time by acquiring talent, companies, infrastructure, and technologies, all in the pursuit of leapfrogging your competition in the burgeoning field you’re disrupting.
Then, if you’re successful in ascending to the top: kick back, up your prices, and rake in the billions.
From Uber to Amazon, Tesla to Facebook, this game plan has worked time and time again. Jokes on late-night talk shows about companies losing money year after year, or paying a billion dollars for then boutique apps like Instagram, have become unfunny fast, as Big Tech has swallowed advertising, apparel, and everything in between.
But no company has ever burned as much money as OpenAI is planning to.
In the last few weeks, major deals with Broadcom and Oracle have thrown into sharp relief just how insane OpenAI’s ambitions are. The Oracle deal alone is worth $300 billion over five years starting in 2027. OpenAI does not have that kind of cash.
In fact, four of the tech world’s big “cash incinerators” — Uber, Tesla, Snap, and Netflix — together burned a pathetic ~$42 billion during their respective heavily cash-burning periods.
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Per The Information, OpenAI is planning on burning $115 billion through 2029. Given that the company raised “only” $40 billion earlier this year — and $64 billion in its lifetime to date, per Pitchbook data — it’s fair to assume that OpenAI will have to dip into the capital markets again to raise another $50 billion to $75 billion to fund its spending splurge.
And OpenAI’s funding needs might not stop there — after that monstrous 2029 spending figure is reached, the company could still be on the hook for hundreds of billions of dollars as part of the freshly inked deal with Oracle, which runs for five years and only starts in 2027.
We’re going to need a bigger cap table
Just a few years ago, the idea of raising that amount on the deeply liquid public markets would have been remarkable; the biggest IPO ever was 2014’s Alibaba, which raised $25 billion — a figure that might not cover even a single year of OpenAI’s peak cash burn. Doing it in private markets would have been near unthinkable. Doing it as a complicated entity controlled by a “not-for-profit” entity? Insane.
Last week, the company revealed it had made progress on that last point. The Financial Times reported that OpenAI and Microsoft had signed a “non-binding memorandum of understanding” marking “a significant step forward in the start-up’s effort to convert to a more investor-friendly, for-profit structure.” That could unlock a potential IPO, giving institutional and retail investors the ability to invest directly in the company.
But in August, CEO Sam Altman said that an IPO was not a priority, suggesting there’s a very good chance that OpenAI continues to fund its runway via the private scene.
If the company pulls it off — raises all that money and finds a way to make the unit economics of its chatbot work along the way — it will raise a major question: is the stock market doing its primary job? If the most capital-hungry business of all time doesn’t need to raise on the public markets, we may need to rethink our textbook definitions of the stock market. The capital-allocating conduit that’s been the bedrock of American capitalism for more than a century is increasingly about price discovery, liquidity, and risk transfer, and less about capital formation.
What’s most remarkable, though, is that this might be quite an easy feat for OpenAI. Given the pervasive AI mania that we find ourselves experiencing in 2025, it’s hard to imagine that the world’s leading consumer-facing AI company will struggle to find investors for its cap table in the private markets, even at a nosebleed valuation of $500 billion and even with evidence that AI adoption might be cooling.
Related reading: Where did all the stocks go?
Bitcoin approaches make-or-break level for potential catch-up trade with soaring precious metals
The underperformance of bitcoin versus gold and other speculative assets last year was a head-scratcher.
However, bitcoin’s strong start to 2026 leaves it well positioned for a potential catch-up trade with soaring precious metals, according to Brent Donnelly, president of Spectra Markets — so long as the crypto asset is able to break through near-term resistance levels that loom.
The shaded area in the below chart shows “an important series of supports that I had focused on back in the summer of 2025 and again in November 2025. The level broke somewhat cleanly and we have not been back above since,” he wrote in a note to clients on Wednesday. “Broken megasupports like that tend to become important resistance on the way back up so bears can get busy as we near the 98400/99400 zone, or bulls can add on a break of 100k. I would think a move through 100,000 would trigger a strong psychological response from the market given the laggy nature of bitcoin vs. gold, silver, and stocks.”
“In a world where there is a shortage of good places to park your money if you’re worried about counterparty risk, it makes sense that gold and silver would be rallying,” he concluded. “Then again, it would have made sense that bitcoin would be rallying too, and it went straight down for the second half of 2025.”
Satellite stocks continue to surge amid geopolitical concerns, with Rocket Lab, Planet Labs, and EchoStar hitting records
Satellite services stocks Rocket Lab, Planet Labs, and EchoStar all notched closing records as geopolitical instability continues to push them higher.
Planet Labs President and CFO Ashley Johnson presented at the Needham Growth Conference today, talking up her company’s recent deal with the Swedish Air Force. She called the deal “a signal of the urgency that you’re hearing from nations around the world for the need to have their own intelligence capabilities, their own eyes in the sky to understand what’s going on, to make sure that they have the proper preparedness.”
Satellite stocks have been surging in the face of an uptick in global instability and White House actions and saber-rattling aimed at Venezuela, Iran, and remarkably Denmark, over President Trump’s fixation on annexing Greenland.
Since the ball dropped on New Year’s Eve, their gains have been eye-watering: Rocket Lab is up nearly 30%, Planet Labs is up 34%, and EchoStar has risen 21%.
After all, the low-Earth orbit industry began as a way to easily establish redundancies for communications, intelligence, and missile defense capabilities. Military and government contracting remain important cornerstones of the business.
Intel rises again, riding a wave of Trump support and Apple speculation
Intel is up again early Wednesday, coming within spitting distance of two-year highs, after comments from the president fed into stock market murmurs about the prospect for Apple to become a key customer for Intel’s ailing contract chip-manufacturing business.
In off-the-cuff comments to reporters Tuesday, President Trump took a victory lap over Intel’s rally since the US government’s investment in August.
“The stock went very up, and very high and we made tens of billions of dollars,” Trump said, adding that “as soon as we went in, Apple went in, Nvidia went in, a lot of smart people went in. They followed us.”
Nvidia took the unusual step of buying a $5 billion stake in Intel in September. But it’s unclear what Trump meant by “Apple went in.”
The comment is consistent with market speculation that Apple — another company whose operational decisions Trump has pressured and influenced — could become a key customer for the next-generation chipmaking technology known as 18A. Intel has bet billions on 18A in an effort to resuscitate its ailing contract chip-manufacturing business, known as a foundry. But the chipmaker has yet to land a key customer willing to let it make its chips with the new process.
In a note published this week, KeyBanc analyst John Vinh said he believes that Apple will be a key customer for 18A, but no announcement about any deal has been made.
So was Trump confused? Did he let something important slip? Was it merely a bit of Trumpian puffery? All unclear.
What is plain, however, is that investors are taking cues on what to buy based on the deep personal involvement of an intensely stock market-sensitive US president.
It might not be the ideal of free market capitalism. But in Intel’s case, it does seem to make the number go up, at least so far.
“The stock went very up, and very high and we made tens of billions of dollars,” Trump said, adding that “as soon as we went in, Apple went in, Nvidia went in, a lot of smart people went in. They followed us.”
Nvidia took the unusual step of buying a $5 billion stake in Intel in September. But it’s unclear what Trump meant by “Apple went in.”
The comment is consistent with market speculation that Apple — another company whose operational decisions Trump has pressured and influenced — could become a key customer for the next-generation chipmaking technology known as 18A. Intel has bet billions on 18A in an effort to resuscitate its ailing contract chip-manufacturing business, known as a foundry. But the chipmaker has yet to land a key customer willing to let it make its chips with the new process.
In a note published this week, KeyBanc analyst John Vinh said he believes that Apple will be a key customer for 18A, but no announcement about any deal has been made.
So was Trump confused? Did he let something important slip? Was it merely a bit of Trumpian puffery? All unclear.
What is plain, however, is that investors are taking cues on what to buy based on the deep personal involvement of an intensely stock market-sensitive US president.
It might not be the ideal of free market capitalism. But in Intel’s case, it does seem to make the number go up, at least so far.
Since news of the lack of news dropped around 10:12 a.m. ET, Crocs, RH, and Under Armour have been among the worst-performing members in this group, all off more than 1% in the past 10 minutes.
Since news of the lack of news dropped around 10:12 a.m. ET, Crocs, RH, and Under Armour have been among the worst-performing members in this group, all off more than 1% in the past 10 minutes.
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