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Comment by nl

13 hours ago

OpenAI has hardly borrowed anything. They have a $4B revolving credit line but have hardly touched it. They haven't issued any bonds.

Investment isn't debt.

They owe people hundreds of billions, possibly even over a trillion. They've just been very clever in how they've structured it, so on paper they have low debt.

  • I think there’s some crossed wires here with the wider data centre build outs. OpenAI have their own flavours of sketchy behaviour but I’m not aware of them solely being on the hook for those amounts short of some weird accounting of Microsoft cloud costs onto them or something.

    • Don’t they have a fully committed preorder for like $500 billion in compute from Oracle starting in 2028? And Oracle is funding that buildout with junk debt?

      2 replies →

The rates environment directly dictates what capital is available to OpenAI and at what terms. When potential investors can get x% virtually guaranteed, then they are less willing to give cash for equity to OpenAI.