Published on the 28/05/2025 | Written by Heather Wright
“We greatly appreciate President Trump for his support in making it possible.”
OpenAI is on the growth trail – well beyond just ChatGPT – with two multi-billion dollar deals announced, including one which sees it head into the Middle East.
First up was a US$6.4 billion deal to buy Apple veteran Jony Ive’s AI device startup, io. OpenAI already owned 23 percent of the company, so the all-equity deal itself is actually *only* US$5 billion.
“We greatly appreciate President Trump for his support in making it possible.”
It’s a deal that takes OpenAI into the hardware arena, with the io team merging with OpenAI to ‘take over design for all of OpenAI including its software’. Ive himself won’t be joining OpenAI, but he and his creative collective, LoveFrom, will ‘assume deep design and creative responsibilities across OpenAI and io’.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Ive said in a video that consumers can expect ‘a family of AI products’ – which have also been dubbed AI ‘companions’ – and that there’s the opportunity ‘to completely reimagine what it means to use a computer’. Reports have suggested they’re already working on an AI companion device, though Altman has previously said he has ‘no interest’ in trying to compete with smartphones.
Ming-Chi Kuo, a supply chain analyst known for Apple predictions, claims the current prototype is slightly larger than the Humane’s failed AI Pin (which was also backed by Altman but shut down less than a year after the Pin launched), with a form factor ‘as compact and elegant as an iPod Shuffle’.
Hedging his bets, he notes the design and specifications ‘may change before mass production, which he says will start in 2027, with Vietnam the most likely assembly location to reduce geopolitical risks.
Kuo says the device will be able to be worn around the neck, and will have cameras and microphones for environmental detection, with no display functionality, and will connect to smartphones and PCs.
It’s by far OpenAI’s largest acquisition to date and comes just weeks after the company announced it was buying AI-assisted coding tool Windsurf – formerly known as Codeium – for US$3 billion in a move to boost ChatGPT’s coding functionality and enable OpenAI to better compete in the emerging agentic AI market.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI had reportedly been keen to nab Anysphere, whose AI coding assistant Cursor has been a hot property. That hotness, however, apparently saw Anysphere not in the market to be sold, even to OpenAI.
(It also acquired search and database analytics firm Rockset for an undisclosed sum in June 2024.)
A day after the io deal announcement came news that, following a deal between US President Donald Trump and the United Arab Emirates, OpenAI will help develop what will be one of the world’s largest data centres in the United Arab Emirates as part of the Stargate project.
Stargate, of course, was the deal launched earlier this year amid much Trump-driven fanfare and which will see $500 billion invested – courtesy of the likes of OpenAI, Oracle, Nvidia and Softbank – over the next four years to build new ‘AI infrastructure’, including large scale data centres, for Open AI in the US. An initial $100 billion is being used to build two data centres in Texas, with construction already underway.
While building the infrastructure for AI is the more practical aspect of the project, there’s a wider goal of establishing the United States as a leader in AI innovation, with OpenAI saying the project will support the re-industralisation of the US and provide strategic capability to protect the national security of the US and its allies.
Stargate UAE will include a one gigawatt cluster in Abu Dhabi, with 200MW expected to go live next year. OpenAI is expected to be one of the primary anchor tenants for campus.
“Stargate UAE has the potential to provide AI infrastructure and compute capacity within a 2,000-mile radius, reaching up to half the world’s population,” OpenAI says.
Altman was one of a number of tech CEOs who accompanied Trump on his Middle East tour, announcing a slew of multi-billion dollar tech deals along the way, including an agreement for the UAE to build the largest AI campus outside the United States – that’s the one Stargate will be one part of. The full facility will be a five gigawatt offering.
In a sign of Trump’s role in Stargate UAE, Altman, in announcing the deal, thanked Trump for his ‘support in making it possible’ and said the project was developed ‘in close coordination with the US government’.
As well as playing apparent ‘broker-in-chief’ on the Middle East tour, the Trump administration recently reversed the Biden administrations restrictions on chip exports.
Trump’s UAE agreement includes the UAE committing to invest, build or finance US data centres that are at least as large and as powerful as those in the UAE, investing a dollar in US AI infrastructure projects for every dollar it invests in Stargate UAE and the broader Abu Dhabi data centre project.
The deal gives the UAE expanded access to advanced AI chips, though which chips haven’t been revealed officially. Reuters, however, has reported that the UAE could be allowed to import 500,000 of Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips each year, starting this year.
OpenAI meanwhile, says Stargate UAE will mean the UAE will become the first country in the world to enable ChatGPT nationwide with ChatGPT Plus, the chatbot’s premium version, to be free for all UAE residents.
