OpenAI's Sam Altman heads for another world tour as AI race tightens

By Saritha Rai, Yazhou Sun, Christina Kyriasoglou and Rachel Metz 

OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman will spend the coming weeks jetting between Tokyo, New Delhi, Dubai and Germany as the race to dominate artificial intelligence takes on new urgency.  

Altman’s trip to meet investors, developers and industry leaders comes at a dramatic moment. The Chinese upstart DeepSeek shocked the world with an AI model that its makers claimed to have developed for a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, upending markets globally on Monday. The announcement brought into question the economics of an entire industry whose outlays for AI projects can be in the tens of billions. 

 

Altman addressed concerns in a closed-door briefing with policymakers on Thursday, saying that DeepSeek underscored the need for Stargate — an OpenAI, Oracle and SoftBank-led joint venture to build data centers across the U.S. Over the next several weeks, he’ll aim to do the same with partners worldwide, reinforcing the message that it’s worthwhile to continue investing in the model around developing GPT.

 

“There is enormous interest in OpenAI’s technology, including how our next generation of agents can deliver economic value,” OpenAI said in a statement Friday. “We will be meeting with business leaders, developers, and partners across multiple countries in the coming weeks.”

 

Bloomberg reported this week that OpenAI is in talks to raise funds at a valuation of as much as $300 billion in a new SoftBank-led funding round.

 

Altman will arrive in Tokyo on Monday to meet with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is also set to meet with him and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, according to a government advisory. 

 

Altman will then head to Seoul, and will sit down with investors in New Delhi before participating in a panel on the future of AI at Berlin’s Technical University on Friday. The following week will see Altman in France for the Paris AI Summit, which he’ll attend alongside Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei and Demis Hassabis, who oversees Google’s AI efforts. 

 

The OpenAI CEO is expected to then head to Dubai for the World Government Summit, where he’ll join Alphabet Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai, Oracle Corp. co-founder Larry Ellison, and Joseph Tsai, chairman of Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. 

 

This will be Altman’s second global tour for the company. In 2023, the CEO spent two weeks traveling to Singapore, the United Arab Emirates, Japan, South Korea, Israel, Australia and six other countries to promote what was then a new technology whose sudden rise spooked many lawmakers. Last year, he traveled to the Middle East to fundraise for chip projects not directly related to OpenAI.

 

On this trip, Altman is now the incumbent, and no longer has to evangelize. Most of his meetings will be with investors, according to people familiar with the plans, suggesting that despite the scare from DeepSeek, OpenAI is still betting that the company with the most resources will come out on top.