| |  | Jan 20, 2026 | | | | | Supported by |  | | | | | | Tuesday is here! OpenAI's CFO says the company's revenue is keeping up with its compute costs. Google's Gemini saw a doubling in developer demand during a five month period last year. And OpenAI is on track to introduce its first hardware device later this year.
| | | | OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said in a blog post on Sunday that the company's annualized revenue has grown at approximately the same rate as its consumption of computational resources. Friar said that OpenAI's compute has tripled year over year—from 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to 0.6 gigawatts in 2024 and 1.9 gigawatts in 2025—while revenue has similarly tripled year over year—from $2 billion in annualized revenue in 2023 to $6 billion in 2024 to more than $20 billion in 2025. Friar also added in the post that the "next phase is agents and workflow automation that run continuously, carry context over time, and take action across tools." This includes AI that "manages projects, coordinates plans, and executes tasks" for individuals and AI that "becomes an operating layer for knowledge work" for organizations, she wrote. Friar's post comes as OpenAI looks to grow its access to computational resources even more. The company has struck deals with multiple cloud providers and chipmakers, including Oracle, Nvidia and Cerebras Systems, in recent months. It has also found new avenues to make money, including, most recently, adding advertisements to its free and cheaper tiers of ChatGPT. | | | | Google's Gemini saw a doubling in developer demand during a five month period last year. The Information reported that, in August, Google saw around 85 billion requests from developers sent to its Gemini application programming interface, up from about 35 billion in March. Those requests, known as API calls, are the primary method through which Google sells access to those AI models. The growing demand could help lift revenues in Google's cloud unit, which handles sales of Gemini to developers for the company. Another Google AI offering, Gemini Enterprise, has grown to 8 million subscribers, The Information reported. Gemini Enterprise combines access to the Gemini chatbot with the ability to search across a company's internal data. It also includes a platform for building and using AI agents. | | | | A top OpenAI executive said the company is planning to introduce its first hardware device in the latter half of 2026. In an interview with Axios at an event in Davos, Switzerland, Chris Lehane, OpenAI's chief global affairs officer, said the AI startup is "on track" to show the product later in the year. That timing is consistent with past messages from OpenAI about its first device. OpenAI's hardware devices will be the result of a collaboration between the company and Jony Ive, Apple's former design chief. Last year, OpenAI acquired a device startup that Ive co-founded, io, though Ive still works for his independent design firm, LoveFrom. Lehane declined to discuss what type of device OpenAI's first hardware product will be. | | | | Sequoia Capital is set to make a significant first-time investment in the AI start-up Anthropic as part of a major funding round expected to raise $25 billion or more, The Financial Times reported. Anthropic is seeking a valuation of $350 billion as part of the effort, more than double its valuation from just four months prior, The FT reported. The round is expected to include contributions from GIC, Coatue, Microsoft and Nvidia. Sequoia's involvement is notable because the firm is also a backer of Anthropic's rivals, including OpenAI and xAI, suggesting a belief that the AI market is large enough for multiple successful companies. Spokespeople for Sequoia and Anthropic didn't respond to requests for comment. | | | | An exodus of staffers from Thinking Machines Lab this week has rattled some investors in the AI startup led by Mira Murati. The Information reported that Murati and other Thinking Machines employees were caught off guard earlier this week when two senior researchers at the startup, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz, posted their resignations to the company Slack during an all hands meeting. Murati used the all hands meeting to announce she had fired a Thinking Machines co-founder and chief technology officer, Barret Zoph. In total, five Thinking Machines staffers left the startup last week, four of whom joined OpenAI. The talent raid could complicate Thinking Machines' efforts to close an ambitious funding round that aims to value the one-year-old company at $50 billion. | | | | If Elon Musk wins his breach of charitable trust lawsuit against OpenAI, the company should have to give up between $65.5 billion and $109.43 billion to Musk, lawyers for the billionaire argued in a court filing Friday. Microsoft, which Musk alleges aided and abetted OpenAI's breach of fiduciary duty, is on the hook for between $13.3 billion and $25.06 billion, Musk's lawyers argued. Though Musk only donated about $38 million to help establish OpenAI, his lawyers argue that OpenAI should have to forfeit all of the benefits they gained as a result of those donations. The estimates of those benefits that Musk's lawyers cited in their recent filing came from C. Paul Wazzan, an expert witness that Musk's lawyers retained. Wazzan is an economist at Berkeley Research Group, an economic consulting firm. He arrived at the figures by taking the OpenAI nonprofit's share of OpenAI's business and assuming that Musk contributed between 50% and 75% of that value. Lawyers for OpenAI have objected to Wazzan's methodology and asked the court to toss out much of his testimony. For instance, OpenAI's lawyers argue that Wazzan did not adequately explain how he came up with Musk's share of the nonprofit's value. This brief has been updated to include OpenAI's response to Wazzan's testimony. | | | | Figure AI, the humanoid robotics startup, responded to a lawsuit from its former head of product safety Rob Gruendel and countersued Gruendel, according to court filings made public on Friday. Figure alleged in a filing that Gruendel violated trade secret law and company policy by saving company documents to his personal Google account, likely costing Figure at least $75,000 in damages. Figure also says that Gruendel refused to repay his $90,000 signing bonus as required by his employment contract, since he worked at the company for less than a full year. Gruendel sued Figure for wrongful termination and whistleblower retaliation in November, alleging that Figure had deprioritized safety and fired him for raising safety concerns. In the latest filings, Figure counters that it takes safety seriously and Gruendel was fired for poor performance. "Gruendel failed at his job," Figure wrote in its countersuit. "Instead of assisting the company in fulfilling its safety mission, Gruendel's tenure at Figure was marked by a fundamental inability to distinguish between safety engineering and compliance theater. The company terminated him after it concluded that he was wholly incapable of fulfilling the role for which he was hired: helping the company build a safe robot." Figure pointed out in its filings that humanoid robotics are too early to have dedicated industrial safety standards. As we have reported, the U.S. is fast-tracking such guidance, after Gruendel suggested at a standards meeting last year that he could work with a different standards group to write a competing standard that is less strict than a forthcoming international standard. | | | | Clickhouse, a database management startup competing with Snowflake and Databricks, said Friday it had raised $400 million in a financing led by Dragoneer Investment Group. The round values the startup at $15 billion including the new investment, a spokesperson said. That's more than double the valuation of its last round in May. The company also said it had bought Langfuse, a German startup that monitors AI systems. The acquisition follows Snowflake's purchase of observability startup Observe. Clickhouse software stores and manages digital event data, such as when a person clicks a button or fails to log in to an app. Some investors think ClickHouse's data will be in more demand as developers turn to AI agents. The company said its annual recurring revenue rose 250% year over year. In the first quarter of 2025, it was generating roughly $70 million in annual recurring revenue, The Information previously reported. Over the last three months, customers Capital One, Lovable, Decagon, Polymarket and Airwallex have started to use the company's services or expanded their business. Clickhouse was spun out of the Dutch parent of Russian search engine company Yandex in 2021. That parent company, renamed Nebius, owns a little less than 30% of Clickhouse. Shares of Nebius, which competes with Coreweave, rose 5% on Friday. Bessemer Venture Partners, GIC and Index Ventures were among the other investors in the new round. | | | | OpenAI said Friday it will begin testing ads in ChatGPT in the coming weeks. The ads will show up for nonpaying users as well as for users of ChatGPT Go, a low-cost subscription tier first launched in India and now available in 171 countries. U.S. users will now have access to ChatGPT Go for $8 a month. In 2025, OpenAI also introduced a lower-cost subscription plan, ChatGPT Go, in countries like India, where it costs roughly $5 per month. The company says the ads will show up when there's a relevant query to a sponsored product or service, confirming The Information's previous reporting. OpenAI says the ad will also be clearly labeled and shown separately to ChatGPT's organic responses. Users will be able to understand why an ad is being shown and dismiss ads. These ads will only be shown to adult ChatGPT users and won't be included as part of sensitive or regulated issues, such as mental health. OpenAI has previously told investors it expects to grow the average revenue per nonpaying user from $2 in 2026 to $15 by the end of 2030. The $8 monthly Go tier could help the company generate revenue from the more than the 5% of roughly 900 million weekly active users that pay for its subscriptions. | | | | DoorDash chief revenue officer Lee Brown is departing, just a few months after joining, DoorDash confirmed. The news was reported earlier by Bloomberg. Brown had joined DoorDash last summer after nearly six years at Spotify, where he was the global head of advertising. At DoorDash, Brown dealt with business development and accounting management with restaurants, grocery stores and other merchants, reporting to Chief Operating Officer Prabir Adarkar. Brown will be succeeded by DoorDash's vice president of enterprise sales and business development, Shanna Preve. In a statement sent by DoorDash, Preve said her focus would be on "continuing to perfect our disciplined execution." Brown was quoted saying he was "fortunate to have a front-row seat to how a world-class team scales and operates a global three-sided marketplace with extraordinary rigor. DoorDash continues to out-execute its competitive set, and I'm confident the business, strategy, and leadership position the company for an even stronger future." | | | | | Popular articles
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