OpenAI CFO Pushes to Delay IPO to 2027 as Revenue Targets Slip

OpenAI is wildly expensive IPO may not happen in 2026 after all. Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar has privately recommended postponing the company is public debut until 2027, according to a new Wall Street Journal profile of Friar by reporters Berber Jin and Corrie Driebusch, as covered by Gizmodo and Binance News.

The recommendation comes as OpenAI missed its own recent revenue targets, per an earlier Journal report from Jin. OpenAI is private and does not publicly disclose financials, so the missed targets were reportedly shared via anonymous comments to the Journal.

The core tension inside OpenAI is between spending and earning. A report late last year based on internal documents, cited by Gizmodo via the Journal, put OpenAI is data center commitment at $1.4 trillion over eight years. The company was projected to lose $74 billion in 2028 alone.

That is the same year Anthropic, OpenAI is main rival, is on course to break even — thanks largely to rapid enterprise customer adoption generating steady revenue. Friar has reportedly sought to rein in data center spending while revenue catches up, even as CEO Sam Altman continues pushing for faster growth.

The Journal, per Gizmodo is reporting, frames Friar in the mold of Silicon Valley is famous operational adults: Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook and Gwynne Shotwell at SpaceX — executives brought in to impose financial discipline on founder‑led chaos.

Friar previously oversaw the IPO of Jack Dorsey is payments company Square (the stock dropped 10% after her departure) and took Nextdoor public via SPAC (the stock tumbled). She also oversaw Nextdoor is 2023 layoffs that cut 25% of staff before moving to OpenAI in 2024.

The track record suggests a CFO comfortable making hard calls — exactly the profile you bring in when burn rate is measured in billions per quarter.

Banks advising both OpenAI and Anthropic have been blunt, Binance News reports citing the Journal,: whoever goes public first gets to define the AI industry in the eyes of public market investors. It is a winner‑take‑all narrative that raises the stakes on every quarterly revenue number.

Google is recent earnings added pressure. The company reported $20 billion in AI‑derived revenue, painting a picture of a market where AI money is real and flowing — just not necessarily to OpenAI, whose consumer‑heavy business model differs from Google is enterprise and cloud approach.

OpenAI is response to the Journal introduced a strange wrinkle. A company spokesperson claimed OpenAI did hit its revenue goals for Q1 2026 — but said those goals were internal targets different from the ones investors track.

In other words: we hit the goals we set for ourselves, just not the goals we told our backers about. It is the kind of distinction that makes public market investors nervous, which may be exactly why Friar is advocating for a delay.

A delayed IPO is not just a finance story. It signals that OpenAI is under real pressure to show revenue before facing quarterly earnings calls. That pressure flows downstream to pricing, product strategy, and developer relations.

OpenAI has already started tracking free ChatGPT users for advertising purposes and running promotions like free ChatGPT Pro for Codex pet creators. If the IPO timeline slides, expect more aggressive monetization moves — and potentially better deals for developers as OpenAI competes to keep its user base growing.