Why OpenAI Is Doubling Down on Enterprises

The circular funding party continues! This morning, Nvidia announced that it’s invested $2 billion into cloud provider CoreWeave, who said it’ll use that capital to build more than five gigawatts in AI data center capacity by 2030. CoreWeave also said that it’ll be an early adopter of Nvidia products like its AI chips and software. This is just another example of how Nvidia has used its deep coffers to support allies like CoreWeave, which have become big providers of Nvidia chips.

Onto today’s column…

So far, OpenAI’s been most well-known for its ubiquitous, largely consumer-focused ChatGPT chatbot. As my colleagues Kevin and Sri reported this weekend, though, it’s now ramping up its push to sell services to businesses.

In one example, we reported that OpenAI CEO Sam Altman earlier this month wined-and-dined executives from large firms including Disney CEO Bob Iger to pitch them on the company’s tools for businesses, such as its coding tool Codex and its application programming interface.

OpenAI has always sold products to businesses, but historically, its rival Anthropic has been seen as stronger in the enterprise. (Both also face competition from Microsoft, Google and others selling AI services to companies). OpenAI is likely looking to expand its enterprise business because the growth of ChatGPT has likely slowed in recent months. The company had a goal of reaching one billion weekly active users for ChatGPT by the end of 2025, and it seems unlikely it ended up hitting it, given that it hadn’t yet reached 900 million weekly active users in early December.