OpenAI adds BlackRock exec Adebayo Ogunlesi to board of directors
Bayo Ogunlesi, Chairman, Global Infrastructure Partners listens as US President Donald Trump speaks during a strategic and policy discussion with CEOs in the State Department Library in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building on April 11, 2017 in Washington, DC.
Pool | Getty Images
OpenAI said Tuesday that Adebayo Ogunlesi, a senior managing director at BlackRock, is joining the startup’s board of directors, the latest announcement in the company’s move toward a for-profit structure.
Ogunlesi is a founding partner of Global Infrastructure Partners, an infrastructure investing firm that was acquired by BlackRock last year for $12 billion. Before helping to start GIP in 2006, Ogunlesi spent 23 years at Credit Suisse.
“The rapid advancement and development of AI offers a unique opportunity to build a better future,” Ogunlesi said in OpenAI’s announcement Tuesday. “As part of this, thoughtful strategies and investment in infrastructure will be key to unlocking AI’s full potential and delivering its benefits responsibly. I’m excited to contribute to this effort and look forward to being a part of the OpenAI Board.”
For OpenAI, the addition of Ogunlesi to its board marks another step in its dramatic transformation to a for-profit company. The board has been almost entirely revamped since late 2023, when CEO Sam Altman was abruptly ousted before being quickly reinstated.
Former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor, who was chairman at Twitter before its purchase by Elon Musk, became chair of OpenAI after the Altman ordeal in November 2023. Larry Summers, a former Treasury secretary, joined at the same time. Last year, the board added several new faces including Instacart CEO Fidji Simo and Dr. Sue Desmond-Hellmann, former CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, now known as the Gates Foundation.
OpenAI, which was founded as a nonprofit in 2015, said in late December that it will create a public benefit corporation to oversee commercial operations, removing some of its nonprofit restrictions and allowing it to function more like a high-growth startup.
Last year, OpenAI was valued at $157 billion as it continued rolling out updated large language models and new tools after kicking off the generative artificial intelligence boom in late 2022.
The company said that by transforming into a Delaware PBC “with ordinary shares of stock,” it can pursue commercial operations while separately hiring a staff for its nonprofit arm and allowing that wing to take on charitable activities in health care, education and science, OpenAI said in December.
Musk, one of OpenAI’s co-founders is suing to try and stop OpenAI from converting into a full for-profit business.
Ogunlesi’s other board positions include BlackRock, Topgolf Callaway Brands, Kosmos Energy Holdings and Terminal Investment Ltd.
— CNBC’s Hayden Field contributed to this report.
Jensen Huang, chief executive officer of Nvidia Corp., during the US-Saudi Investment Forum at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, US, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 2025.
Stefani Reynolds | Bloomberg | Getty Images
In the weeks leading up to Nvidia’s third-quarter earnings report, investors debated whether the markets were in an AI bubble, fretting over the massive sums being committed to building data centers and whether they could provide a long-term return on investment.
During Wednesday’s earnings call with analysts, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang began his comments by rejecting that premise.
“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” Huang said. “From our vantage point we see something very different.”
In many respects, Huang’s remarks are to be expected. He’s leading the company at the heart of the artificial intelligence boom, and has built its market cap to $4.5 trillion because of soaring demand for Nvidia’s graphics processing units.
Huang’s smackdown of bubble talk matters because Nvidia counts every major cloud provider — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Oracle — as a customer. Most of the major AI model developers, including OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI and Meta, are also big buyers of Nvidia GPUs.
Huang has deep visibility into the market, and on the call he offered a three-pronged argument for why we’re not in a bubble.
First, he said that areas like data processing, ad recommendations, search systems, and engineering, are turning to GPUs because they need the AI. That means older computing infrastructure based around the central processor will transition to new systems running on Nvidia’s chips.
Second, Huang said, AI isn’t just being integrated into current applications, but it will enable entirely new ones.
Finally, according to Huang, “agentic AI,” or applications that can run without significant input from the user, will be able to reason and plan, and will require even more computing power.
In making the case of Nvidia, Huang said it’s the only company that can address the three use cases.
“As you consider infrastructure investments, consider these three fundamental dynamics,” Huang said. “Each will contribute to infrastructure growth in the coming years.”
Reversing the slide
In its earnings release, Nvidia reported revenue and profit that sailed past estimates and issued better-than-expected guidance. Last month, Huang provided a $500 billion forecast for sales of the company’s AI chips over calendar 2025 and 2026.
The company said on Wednesday that its order backlog didn’t even include a few recent deals, like an agreement with Anthropic that was announced this week or the expansion of a deal with Saudi Arabia.
“The number will grow,” CFO Colette Kress said on the call, saying the company was on track to hit the forecast.
Prior to Wednesday’s results, Nvidia shares were down about 8% this month. Other stocks tied to the AI have gotten hit even harder, with CoreWeave plunging 44% in November, Oracle dropping 14% and Palantir falling 17%.
Some of the worry on Wall Street has been tied to the debt that certain companies have used to finance their infrastructure buildouts.
“Our customers’ financing is up to them,” Huang said.
Specific to Nvidia, investors have raised concerns in recent weeks about how much of the company’s sales were going to a small number of hyperscalers.
Last month, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet all lifted their forecasts for capital expenditures due to their AI buildouts, and now collectively expect to spend more than $380 billion this year.
Huang said that even without a new business model, Nvidia’s chips boost hyperscaler revenue, because they power recommendation systems for short videos, books, and ads.
People will soon start appreciating what’s happening underneath the surface of the AI boom, Huang said, versus “the simplistic view of what’s happening to capex and investment.”
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