OpenAI’s restructuring: how the company's structure works

OpenAI announced Tuesday that it had completed a tumultuous corporate restructuring effort, simplifying a complex ownership web for the ChatGPT creator.

OpenAI announced Tuesday morning that it had completed a tumultuous corporate restructuring effort, simplifying a complex ownership web into a controlling nonprofit entity and a reimagined for-profit subsidiary.

The simplified structure will allow investors and corporate partners to more easily reap returns from their investments and pave the way to an envisioned public offering. The for-profit’s board will be appointed solely by the overarching nonprofit entity and will, for now, consist entirely of the nonprofit organization’s board members.

In a livestream session announcing the change Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the for-profit entity “will be able to attract the resources we need for [our] gigantic infrastructure buildout to serve the research and product goals that we have.”

Altman said OpenAI has committed to spend roughly $1.4 trillion on infrastructure so far, largely devoted to the data centers and high-performance computing chips required to train and power cutting-edge artificial intelligence systems.

The umbrella nonprofit organization will be rebranded as the OpenAI Foundation, and the for-profit entity will be called the OpenAI Group.