UAE leads $30B OpenAI round

by Tim Official: OpenAI

Abu Dhabi is paying OpenAI to pay Abu Dhabi. The UAE is leading a $30 billion round, and the money could come right back through a computing deal OpenAI is negotiating in the UAE. We've seen these loops before, and so has the IMF. Earlier this month it counted 14 deals since 2023 where investors poured about $950 billion of equity and debt into AI companies and got $1.4 trillion of future revenue promised back to them. It called that wrong-way risk, because the investment and the revenue tied to it collapse at the same moment. The circle works like this: UAE-backed funds put billions into OpenAI. OpenAI is negotiating to buy more computing power in the UAE. The UAE keeps the OpenAI stake and could earn its money back as compute revenue, while OpenAI gets a headline-sized funding round. Both sides can report growth, and the same dollars have only made a round trip. And the price is already sliding: About a month ago, OpenAI was reportedly asking for $30 billion at $1.4 trillion. Now the number is $1.25 trillion, $150 billion lower, and OpenAI reportedly wants the commitments signed by the end of next week. That's 25x the $50 billion annualized revenue it told investors it had at the end of September, for a company planning around $600 billion of computing spend by 2030. And the loudest warning about this deal literally came from Sam Altman HIMSELF... In August 2025 he told reporters that investors were overexcited about AI, called the valuations insane, and said someone was going to get burned. In 2023, at an event in Abu Dhabi of all places, he said OpenAI shouldn't go public because a company building superintelligence would make decisions that public-market investors would find very strange. OpenAI filed confidential IPO paperwork in June, and this round is being framed as the bridge to get there. So who is this bridge for? The UAE gets in below the price OpenAI wanted a month ago, with a computing contract on the side. OpenAI gets cash to keep spending until the listing. And the public gets the stock after the IPO, at whatever price the bankers set, once the investors with the best terms are already in. Before OpenAI lists, the filing should answer one question: How much of the money raised from each investor comes back to that investor as contracts? Every dollar that makes a round trip should be disclosed right next to the revenue it props up. If the money ends up back where it started, the only new money in the deal is the public's. #OpenAI