OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar Says AI Boom ‘Just Getting Started’

The boom in the construction of artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure is just getting started, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said Wednesday (Aug. 20).

Interviewed on CNBC’s Squawk Box and asked if the AI boom could be like a “sugar rush,” Friar said the buildout of AI infrastructure is only in its early innings.

“It’s more like the railroads or the buildout of electricity than anything I’ve seen,” Friar said. “The internet, it turns out in hindsight, was actually a relatively capex-light buildout. I think we are just getting started.”

Friar added that AI is “voracious” for GPUs and compute.

“The biggest thing we face is being constantly undercompute,” Friar said. “That’s why we launched Stargate, that’s why we’re doing the bigger builds that you see with Microsoft, Oracle, CoreWeave and so on. And we are just getting started.”

CNBC reported Wednesday that OpenAI’s revenue growth is continuing, with Friar saying that the company had its first $1 billion month in July.

It was reported Friday (Aug. 15) that OpenAI’s ChatGPT mobile app alone is earning more than six times as much revenue as it did last year. The AI chatbot app for iOS and Android devices has made $1.35 billion this year, through July, up from the $174 million it made during the same seven-month period in 2024.

On Wednesday, it was reported that tech stocks were down in part due to fears that the AI industry is overhyped. Declines of big-name tech companies like Nvidia, Arm and Palantir were fueled by a new report from MIT that found that most organizations are getting “zero returns” on their investments into the generative AI space.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Friday that the AI market is in a bubble, and CNBC flagged his comments and noted that Altman is not alone in raising concerns about the speed of AI growth.

Altman told The Verge: “If you look at most of the bubbles in history, like the tech bubble, there was a real thing. Tech was really important. The internet was a really big deal. People got overexcited. Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes. Is AI the most important thing to happen in a very long time? My opinion is also yes.”