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OpenAI is trying to beat Anthropic with the private-equity firms, having reportedly introduced a new guaranteed minimum return of 17.5% and early access to its newest models. That pitch is aimed at firms including TPG and Advent, but this is really a fight over distribution. You see, how the world works is that these buyout firms own big groups of established private companies, so this gives OpenAI a faster way to roll out tools, lock in usage, and build stickier revenue before possible public listings as early as this year, though if we’re being real, Anthropic is winning this clear off. OpenAI goes harder after buyout firms as the battle for enterprise customers gets more expensive The joint-venture setup also helps cover the heavy upfront cost of putting AI inside large companies. That work usually needs engineers to customize models for each client, and that burns cash fast. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are now racing to sign these private-equity partnerships, and that kind of contest is still pretty new in AI. Meanwhile, speaking earlier this month at BlackRock’s US Infrastructure Summit in Washington, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman said, “Anything at this scale, it’s just like so much stuff goes wrong.” He pointed to a severe weather event at a data center campus in Abilene, Texas, that temporarily “brought things down” since that campus is the flagship site of the $500 billion Stargate project involving OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank. Last month, OpenAI hit a valuation of $730 billion in a record fundraising round, right after it backed away from some huge spending plans, shelved some bigger ambitions, and accepted that it may be better off buying giant amounts of cloud capacity instead of trying to build enormous data centers itself. Sam Altman is pulling back from giant buildouts as compute shortages…

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Filed under: News - @ March 23, 2026 12:29 pm