OpenAI’s Latest Mega-Fundraise, Big Tech Earnings Week, Amazon Layoffs?

Sam Altman is fundraising again and the next round could be historic. The OpenAI CEO is reportedly in early talks with Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds about raising $50 billion, a round that could give his company a valuation between $750 billion and $850 billion and eclipse its own record-setting $40 billion SoftBank investment fulfilled just a month ago.

Nobody will doubt Altman’s prolific ability to raise money, but as he adds further billions, two main questions will hang over the company: 1) How many more times can OpenAI secure funding rounds of this magnitude? 2) Can OpenAI live up to the expectations it’s setting for itself?

In recent fundraising rounds, Altman’s climbed the ladder from VCs to mega-funders like Softbank and now he’s eyeing sovereign wealth funds like Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund. If this $50 billion is the first of many mega-rounds from the Gulf States, OpenAI can keep losing money and push ahead with its ambitious agenda. But for every unprecedented fundraise, there’s no guarantee another will follow. Eventually, an IPO will be left, subjecting OpenAI’s numbers to public market scrutiny.

Like most pre-IPO tech companies, OpenAI still isn’t profitable. But the company’s given the public some reason to believe it has a formula for predictable revenue growth. In a blog post last week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said annual recurring revenue has climbed from $2 billion in 2023 to $6 billion in 2024 to $20 billion in 2025. She noted compute and revenue have had similar growth curves, with both growing roughly 3x per year between 2023 and 2025. And she thinks growth could’ve been even faster. “We firmly believe that more compute in these periods would have led to faster customer adoption and monetization,” she wrote.

That’s likely the story OpenAI is telling investors. It’s a simple pitch: “Your cash turns into compute turns into revenue.” And so far, it’s working.

Last week, as OpenAI rivals Google DeepMind and Anthropic made headlines at Davos, some wondered about Altman’s relatively quiet public-facing start to 2026. Behind the scenes though, he and his company have been working to accumulate a vast pile of cash to keep pace in an intensifying AI race. We’ll likely learn more this week.

A Walk Toward Wall Street: Preview of Earnings This Week

Big Tech earnings get underway in earnest his week. We’re expecting reports from a range of major players across the consumer, enterprise, infrastructure, and financial sectors. Including:

• Wednesday: Meta, Microsoft, Tesla, IBM

• Thursday: Intel, Apple, SAP

• Friday: Verizon, Amex

Amazon’s Looming Layoffs?

Amazon is in the process of cutting tens of thousands from its workforce and this week could be the latest mass layoff, according to reports. Reuters says a layoff in the range of 14,000 might be coming this week, with AWS, retail, Prime Video, and more likely to be impacted.

Amazon overhired during the pandemic and is still trying to get to get its management layers and bureaucracy under control. Some will spin the cuts as AI-related, but the technology is not taking these jobs.

Amazon’s workforce typically operates with some level of paranoia due to the company’s intense culture, but these routine, massive cuts are taking that anxiety to the next level. For the sake of company morale, these cuts (should they go through) will hopefully be the last for a while.

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