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Please join The Information at the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, April 27, to hear from top executives and investors on how the rapid buildout of AI is reshaping tech, finance, and capital markets. Learn more here. Welcome back! Will OpenAI make more acquisitions? The ChatGPT maker is in the process of raising $100 billion in additional cash. I wouldn’t be surprised if it uses some of that money or its richly valued shares to buy startups or lure even more talent. After all, it’s done this before. It used its stock to buy hardware guru Jony Ive’s startup, Io Products, in a $6.5 billion deal, when OpenAI was in the middle of raising a round that valued it at $260 billion before the funding. OpenAI is now on the cusp of a financing that will value it at more than $730 billion before the new capital—a higher market cap than all but the top 15 public companies. Of course, OpenAI will need to use the bulk of its latest haul to support its fast-growing, cash-burning business. It has projected it will spend a whopping $665 billion just on computing costs over the next five years, as my colleagues have reported. Against those costs, a startup valued at a few billion dollars looks like pocket change. And thanks to a corporate restructuring last fall, OpenAI can also court founders with traditional equity rather than less common profit-sharing units. What would it buy? It may go after talented engineers, as it did recently by hiring Peter Steinberger, founder of the popular open-source personal agent project OpenClaw. It could buy startups whose staff have expertise in fields where it’s trying to expand, such as healthcare or enterprise software. Earlier this year, for instance, it agreed to pay $100 million in stock, including equity to retain employees, for healthcare app Torch. OpenAI has also shown an interest in buying a coding-related business. Last year, it agreed to buy Windsurf for $3 billion before the deal fell apart and the founders went to Google. Around that time, it also held conversations to buy Cursor, the best known of the coding assistant startups. OpenAI could revisit its Cursor talks or buy one of several other coding-related businesses, as it seeks to catch up to what Anthropic’s Claude Code has achieved in automating coding. Cursor, last valued at $30 billion, would be OpenAI’s largest acquisition to date if it happened. But it would only be about 4% of the company’s new valuation! We know OpenAI is hungry for both people and data, the lifeblood of AI development. Earlier this year, we reported that OpenAI, Anthropic and Google have all been on the prowl for specialized data to train their AI models. These could turn into licensing deals with life sciences or financial services companies—or even outright acquisitions. I asked ChatGPT what OpenAI could acquire, and it said, “The logic would likely fall into a few buckets: distribution, proprietary data, hardware, vertical AI apps and infrastructure.” That’s pretty broad! Either OpenAI has more mergers and acquisitions in the works—or its chatbot is hallucinating. | 
