OpenAI secures a $4bn revolving credit facility
A group of banks extended OpenAI a revolving credit line, giving it more financial flexibility alongside equity funding.
- Money & business
- Minor
OpenAI established an unsecured, undrawn revolving credit facility of $4bn with a consortium of banks including JPMorgan Chase, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Wells Fargo, Santander, SMBC, UBS and HSBC, with an option to expand it by a further $2bn and draw against it over three years.
The facility came the day after OpenAI closed a $6.6bn equity funding round, and together the two put the company’s total liquidity above $10bn by its own account. Chief financial officer Sarah Friar said the credit line “strengthens our balance sheet and provides flexibility to seize future growth opportunities.” Unlike the equity raise, the facility carried no valuation attached to it and, being undrawn, represented contingent access to cash rather than money actually spent.
The move was consistent with a wider pattern among frontier labs of pairing large equity rounds with debt facilities to fund compute-heavy growth without further diluting existing shareholders, and it came as OpenAI’s costs — chiefly for training and inference compute — were reported to be running well ahead of revenue.