Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
This article first appeared in The Edge Malaysia Weekly on June 15, 2026 – June 21, 2026
2026 is turning out to be a bumper year for capital raising on Wall Street. Search giant Google’s parent, Alphabet, was first off the block earlier this month, raising US$84.75 billion (RM345 billion) in a secondary offering, with Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway taking a massive US$10 billion portion of the placement. SpaceX is in the process of raising US$75 billion as part of its initial public offering (or a total of US$86.25 billion including a 15% greenshoe over-allotment). SpaceX needs the money mainly to fund xAI, its fledgling artificial intelligence frontier lab. Anthropic, currently the fastest-growing AI lab, is expected to be next in late August, raising roughly US$70 billion in an IPO. Oh, I forgot to mention, social media behemoth Meta Platforms, which is forking out US$145 billion on AI capex this year, is currently in the market to raise up to US$60 billion in equity through a secondary offering.
Not surprising, then, that on June 8, ChatGPT creator OpenAI announced on its website that it too had submitted a confidential S-1 prospectus to the US Securities and Exchange Commission. In March, it closed its last funding round, raising US$122 billion of committed capital led by Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank Group, which values the frontier lab at around US$852 billion. Analysts expect OpenAI to raise up to US$100 billion towards the end of the year.
OpenAI became the pioneering AI chatbot with the release of ChatGPT at end-November 2022 when central banks around the world were still raising interest rates to stem the rising tide of post-Covid-19 lockdown inflation. Its arrival ended the 2022 bear market and marked the beginning of a new bull market, albeit one that is currently sputtering.
A flood of new shares from firms seeking money to help fund their audacious AI ambitions is now rattling Wall Street, which is concerned that demand might not be enough to absorb the new issuance and the humongous capital raising might impact equity valuations in the tech sector.
Before this, the biggest IPO year was 2021, during the Covid-19 lockdown when US-listed firms raised US$135 billion as part of an unprecedented SPAC, or special purpose acquisition company, boom that saw nearly 600 “blank cheque” shell companies raise money to merge with private start-ups and help take them public.
Until this past week, US-listed firms had raised up to US$76 billion through IPOs alone. If you add in Big Tech’s ongoing and upcoming efforts to raise new money, Wall Street’s total capital raising haul for the year is likely to exceed US$750 billion — an all-time record. Last year, US firms raised nearly US$220 billion — US$44 billion in IPOs and US$176 billion in follow-on secondary offerings. In 2024, US-listed firms raised almost US$222 billion — including US$31.4 billion in IPOs and US$170 billion in secondary offerings.
As the creator of a pioneering chatbot that once possessed first-mover advantage, OpenAI had all the mindshare in AI. Indeed, ChatGPT became the default verb for AI chat the way Google did for search. ChatGPT set the record for the fastest-growing app in history. These days, it is seen as a laggard, struggling to catch up with Claude’s developer Anthropic and Gemini’s creator Google. With Google’s huge capital raising; the IPO of SpaceX, which owns Grok’s maker xAI; and the upcoming IPO of Anthropic as well as Meta raising a ton of cash, OpenAI has suddenly found itself in a race to scoop up as much money as it can just to keep up with its peers. If it delays its IPO, or raises less money than its peers or at a lower valuation than Anthropic, it might find itself way behind in the AI race, where leadership clearly matters.
Here is why OpenAI is currently an also-ran in a race where Google and Anthropic are the front runners. Google, which was being written off not long ago, has the complete AI stack. Simply put, it owns or controls every layer needed to build and deploy AI, from the physical hardware all the way up to consumer products. No other company comes close.
Let’s start from the bottom. Google designs its own chips, or AI accelerators called TPUs (tensor processing units). That means it does not depend on Nvidia’s GPUs (graphics processing units) the way OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta and others do. Nvidia chips are expensive and scarce. As such, it is able to capture huge margins from anyone who buys them. By building its own TPUs aside from buying some Nvidia GPUs, Google has a cost and supply advantage. The search giant also runs its own global network of data centres and sells compute through Google Cloud, which means it controls where and how its chips get deployed at massive scale. Google (through DeepMind and the former Google Brain) has been a foundational research powerhouse for years. Indeed, the transformer architecture, the “T” in OpenAI’s GPT that underpins essentially all modern large language models, came out of a 2017 Google paper. On top of that, there are the AI models themselves, the Gemini family.
There are also Gemini image, video and audio models trained on Google’s own chips in Google’s own data centres. And then there is data. Google has Search, YouTube, Google Maps, Gmail, the Android smartphone operating system and Chrome browser, giving it enormous proprietary data sources and signals that rivals such as OpenAI cannot easily replicate. Not to talk of distribution — Google can push AI features to billions of users instantly through Search, Android, Workspace, Chrome and YouTube. OpenAI has had to gradually build a user base from scratch while Google already has one of the largest user bases in the world. Moreover, Google has the ability to subsidise Gemini indefinitely with a huge stream of search advertising profits while distributing it through Android and Chrome.
Here is how OpenAI is different from Anthropic. The former’s revenue is derived mainly from its consumer subscription business. It has leaned into consumer features and pushed ChatGPT as a mass-market product and has talked about expanding into shopping as a competitor to e-commerce giant Amazon.com and going head-to-head with iPhone and iPad maker Apple in devices. Anthropic’s North Star is business. A large share of its revenue comes from businesses building on Claude — coding tools, customer service and document analysis with products like Claude Code. As OpenAI’s focus is on consumers, it has chased advertising and shopping. For its part, Anthropic has shunned ads and engagement-optimised services. Yet it is not all clear cut. OpenAI has in recent months begun to push its ChatGPT Enterprise, its API or application programming interface business, and has won several government deals. On the other hand, Anthropic has a small but growing consumer business of its own with the Pro and Max subscriptions of Claude and Claude App. Claude is seen as more naturally conversational in longer-form writing and analysis. For its part, ChatGPT has a broader ecosystem of consumer features like image generation (DALL-E), voice modes and custom GPTs.
Here is what you should know about OpenAI’s finances. It had US$2 billion in annualised revenues at the end of 2023. That had grown to US$25 billion in February this year. In comparison, Anthropic now has a US$30 billion annualised run rate, up from US$9 billion at the end of 2025. xAI’s Grok generated merely US$350 million in 2025 and analysts forecast it could reach US$2 billion this year. SpaceX’s IPO filing showed about US$365 million in combined X and Grok subscription revenue for 2025. OpenAI lost US$1.22 for every dollar it earned in revenues. ChatGPT claims to have 900 million users. That is clearly a big number but here is the thing: nearly 94% of those users are on a free tier. That means OpenAI earns no money from them. In comparison, 80% of Anthropic users are enterprise and they include eight of the top 10 companies in the world. Anthropic has over 1,000 companies paying more than a million dollars a year.
Anthropic, which is expected to roughly break even this year, is now projected to have positive free cash flow by next year. OpenAI’s gross margins were 33% last year and are falling. Anthropic has gross margins of roughly 40%. By the way, Apple, mainly a hardware firm, had software-like gross margins of 49.3% in the last quarter. There are other issues with OpenAI, which has committed to literally hundreds of billions in future compute spending and now faces pressure to show it can generate enough cash to pay for its spending spree. Unlike Google, OpenAI rents its compute, buys its chips and depends on partners like Microsoft. Model capabilities between top AI labs are likely to keep converging, which in turn will only compress pricing power. If frontier models become commoditised, their economics will look more like airlines than software. As the heaviest-spending frontier AI lab and with no visible path to profitability until 2030 at the earliest, OpenAI desperately needs access to more cash as soon as possible.
Google’s Gemini does not report its AI revenues or profits separately. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in April that the Gemini app has grown to have over 750 million monthly active users, with Gemini models processing over 16 billion tokens per minute via direct API use, up from 10 billion in the previous quarter. While Google does not break down Gemini’s revenue, Google Cloud grew 63% year on year to US$20 billion in 1QFY2026, or an US$80 billion annualised run rate, fuelled largely by Gemini-powered enterprise services, with over 120,000 enterprises using Gemini. Microsoft too does not break out its Copilot revenues. Analysts at Citi and JPMorgan have cited heavy discounting — in the 40%-60% range — on competitive Copilot deals. Some analysts estimate that Copilot revenue is in the US$1.5 billion to US$2.5 billion range, way below what the US$30 per seat sticker price and Microsoft’s announced deployments would suggest. Recon Analytics data suggests only one in 12 users chooses Copilot when given alternatives.
Microsoft was an early backer of OpenAI, investing US$13 billion in the pioneering AI frontier lab. That gave it an initial 49% economic interest in OpenAI. Over the past two years, Microsoft and OpenAI have shifted away from their tie-up into a non-exclusive agreement. Microsoft remains a 27% shareholder and primary cloud partner while OpenAI is now allowed to distribute models across rival platforms. Microsoft no longer pays a revenue share to OpenAI.
The longer OpenAI waits for its IPO, the more problems it is likely to face. SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, who originally funded OpenAI as a non-profit entity, recently sued OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. He lost the case but has vowed to appeal the court’s verdict.
What’s next for OpenAI and the frontier AI labs? The US government wants a small piece of the trillion-dollar AI labs for free. On June 10, President Donald Trump told journalists he was looking into the matter. Altman had discussed a proposal with the White House for AI firms to voluntarily cede equity stakes to the US government. The proceeds would then go towards funding public benefits such as dividend payments to American households. Last August, the US government took a 9.9% stake in Intel for US$8.9 billion. Intel stock has more than quintupled since. Trump told journalists he expects that the AI labs will eventually agree to his request. He wants America to imitate China’s state capitalism model — picking winners, backing national champions — to pull way ahead in the global AI race.
Assif Shameen is a technology and business writer based in North America
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