HSBC Global Investment Research said that OpenAI (OPENAI) could need $207B in new financing by 2030, as the firm updated its forecasts for the AI startup with its new compute capacity and rental cost schedule.
Analysts led by Nicolas Cote-Colisson said that OpenAI announced a $250B purchase of cloud computing from Microsoft (MSFT) and a $38B deal with Amazon for seven years of cloud computing.
The analysts added that OpenAI was not the only one as rival Anthropic (ANTHRO) — backed by Amazon (AMZN) and Alphabet (GOOG) (GOOGL) — announced a contract with Alphabet for the supply of 1 million TPU AI chips worth “tens of billions of dollars,” a $50B infrastructure investment, and a $30B capacity deal with Microsoft and Nvidia (NVDA), which will inject up to $15B into Anthropic.
“We update our OpenAI forecasts with our new compute capacity and rental cost schedule and conclude it would need USD207bn of new financing by 2030. One unknown parameter is the flexibility that OpenAI may have to adjust its commitment vs effective demand or financial capacity. Capital injections, debt issuance, or higher revenue than in our model would help closing the funding gap,” said Cote-Colisson and his team.
The analysts noted that an AI megacycle is ahead. The analysts said that OpenAI’s forecast of $1.4T of compute costs over eight years adds to investor nervousness about associated returns (given estimated revenue of $12.5B in 2025), not only for OpenAI but for the interlaced AI chain.
“Yet as MSFT’s CEO put it, AI model companies, infrastructure owners, and chipmakers going to market together is helping customers to realize AI’s value. We look at productivity-gain upside that can be significant even not considering Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The most exposed partners to OpenAI success or failure under our coverage are Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft, Amazon, NVIDIA, and AMD (AMD), and so is SoftBank (OTCPK:SFTBY) (OTCPK:SFTBF),” said Cote-Colisson and his team.