OpenAI CEO, Sam Altman It has recently made two moves that say more about the company’s future than any product launch. On March 23, he resigned as chairman of Helion energy, fusion startup he has backed for more than a decade as OpenAI explores a large-scale energy deal with the company. A day later, OpenAI pulled the plug her popular video generation model, Sorasaying it would redeploy resources to its next major language model, codenamed “Spud,” as well as a growing suite of coding agents and enterprise tools.
Taken together, the decisions point to a CEO shedding the limelight, tightening control and preparing for a long-awaited IPO. OpenAI has reinforced that change by bolstering its financial leadership, including the appointment of former DocuSign CFO Cynthia Gaylor to oversee investor relations.
According to The Information, Altman has also relinquished direct oversight of OpenAI’s safety and security teams to focus on “capital, supply chains and building data centers at an unprecedented scale.” The company has merged its security team into the research organization led by the chief research officer Mark Chenmoving security under the “scaling” division run by the co-founder and president Greg Brockman. At the same time, OpenAI has renamed its product organization – led by Simo rewardApplications CEO – at AGI Deployment.
Altman is also said to have narrowed reporting lines, reducing the number of executives reporting directly to him, marking another step toward operational clarity ahead of a potential IPO. Reuters first reported in October 2025 that OpenAI can deliver as early as the second half of 2026, targeting a valuation of up to $1 trillion. In early-stage discussions, the company has raised at least $60 billion in the offering, depending on market conditions and revenue growth.
For much of last year, Altman described the AI infrastructure in sweeping terms, invoking figures approaching $1 trillion to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). That rhetoric is now giving way to something more concrete: roughly $600 billion in computing spending by 2030.
Sora, launched in December 2024, was one of OpenAI’s most compelling demonstrations of how far AI had advanced. But it also exposed a fundamental limitation. Forbes estimates that generating a 10-second video of Sora it costs between $1 and $5 per calculationwith higher costs for premium versions. At scale, this could exceed $5 billion a year, or roughly $15 million a day.
OpenAI is now shifting resources to more profitable enterprise products, particularly coding agents. Internal communications and recent reports from CNBC and The Information suggest the company is “aggressively pivoting” toward enterprise use cases, with ChatGPT evolving from a general-purpose chatbot to a productivity layer—a front for software development, business operations, and knowledge work automation.
As OpenAI leans into enterprise systems, it’s also facing another limitation: energy. Training and running advanced AI models at scale requires large amounts of electricity, making energy one of the industry’s most significant bottlenecks. Altman has long argued that solving AI at scale requires solving power at scale, and OpenAI’s interest in Helion reflects this reality.
His departure from Helion clears up a potential conflict as OpenAI explores a partnership with the fusion startup. Reports suggest that a deal could give OpenAI access to up to 12.5 percent of Helion’s projected output — roughly 5 gigawatts by 2030 and up to 50 gigawatts by 2035.
Helion has yet to begin commercial power generation, but is moving rapidly from prototypes to grid-connected fusion plants. The company is currently building Orion, its first commercial facility in Washington state, with development starting in July 2025 and aiming to deliver an initial 50 megawatts to Microsoft by 2028. If that timeline holds, Orion could serve as a model for scaling to multi-gigawatt fleets over the next decade.
Altman built his reputation on ambitious, systems-level thinking, often speaking in abstractions about the future of intelligence. Now, he is operating as CEO preparing a company for the public markets, where ambition must be matched with discipline and vision must translate into returns. Altman must convince investors that OpenAI can turn unprecedented capital expenditures into sustainable returns while still pursuing AGI’s long-term goal
