What's up: OpenAI IPO? “Not on the cards” yet; Humanoids meet the home; A new quantum computer; Not all the bubble talk in Napa Valley had to do with the sparkling wine.

Good morning. After months of talk about an AI bubble, the AI titans aren’t having it anymore and they aren’t afraid to say so.

Leaders from OpenAI and CoreWeave pushed back Wednesday at the WSJ Tech Live conference against growing warnings that an AI investment bubble will implode, as well as concerns about the nature of deals among AI companies, the capacity of the world to keep funding trillion-dollar global infrastructure investments, or the idea that AI isn’t worth it.

OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said the company’s business was growing and in robust health. Revenue is on track for $13 billion this year, up from $4 billion last year and $1 billion two years ago. That revenue growth needs to continue, given that OpenAI plans to spend more than $1.4 trillion on infrastructure.

Financing the build-out could be more difficult if it turns out that the usable life of leading-edge GPUs is shorter rather than longer, she said during a conversation with WSJ Technology and Media Editor Sarah Krouse.

“If the timeline on the chip stays short, that gets harder. And so this is where we're looking for an ecosystem of banks, private equity, maybe even…ways governments can come to bear,” Friar said.

Friar said the underlying business was strong, despite the fact that the company is losing money. And no, she said an OpenAI IPO isn’t on the cards for now.

“I'm not overly focused on a break-even moment today because I know that if I had to get to a break-even, I have a healthy enough margin structure that I could do that by pulling back on investment in the period,” Friar said.

Krouse observed that “it does feel though that in this moment, there's a lot of exuberance around AI.”

Friar said the exuberance was justified.

I don't know if there's enough exuberance about AI, when I look at the actual practical implications and what it can do for individuals. We talked about it earlier, that mom with the diabetic kid who's at her wit's end about what to make for dinner tonight, right? Chat just changes the whole paradigm because of…the ideas that you get, the ability to photograph your fridge and immediately have a menu plan…A cancer patient can get maybe drugs that…we never thought of before, but a model was able to kind of come up with a new molecular compound and a distribution mechanism that gets it…through FDA approval multiples times faster than we could even imagine. So the exuberance I think is real, and we should keep running at it.

News Corp, owner of The Wall Street Journal, has a content-licensing partnership with OpenAI.

CoreWeave co-founder and Chief Executive Michael Intrator addressed concerns about an AI bubble and the relationships among AI companies including CoreWeave and Nvidia.

CoreWeave’s cloud provides access to Nvidia’s leading AI systems. Nvidia owns about 6% of CoreWeave shares. The WSJ notes that the company tripled revenue in the quarter ended June 30 to $1.2 billion and that its market cap has almost tripled since it went public earlier this year. CoreWeave also has financed its growth with debt, including a $7.5 billion raise last year, one of the largest-ever private debt financings.

Is it a bubble? Intrator says no.

It's very hard for me to worry about a bubble when, you know, as one of the narratives, when you have buyers of infrastructure that are changing the economics of their company. They're building the future…Nobody can do it all. And so you're working together to try and deliver size and scale of infrastructure that the world has never seen before. It stands to reason that you're going to have companies working together, investing together, driving different parts of this market together.

And the New York trader offered equity-loving Silicon Valley a different perspective on debt, the fuel on which much of the economy actually runs.

I mean, that's the nature of the business, right? Like we are building infrastructure, delivering infrastructure. The way that we built our business and we're able to scale our business to such enormous scale so quickly is that we used debt, because debt is the correct way to do this. I realize I'm in Silicon Valley and maybe that doesn't get as much traction as it does in New York, but that is the right way to do this, right? Like when you think about other infrastructure builds that have occurred throughout history, you use debt.

How do you think the AI boom will end? Use the links at the end of this newsletter and let us know.

More Wednesday highlights from WSJ Tech Live California below.

Are humanoid robots ready to be the new home help? Bernt Børnich, founder and CEO of humanoid robot maker 1X sat down with WSJ tech columnist Joanna Stern to discuss the privacy trade-offs, autonomy challenges and usefulness of living with a robot. But before any of that, any worthwhile home robot needs to know how to close the dishwasher door.

WATCH 🎥 Creator of humanoid Neo defends dishwasher difficulties. Børnich responds to the struggles his robot, Neo, had when attempting simple household tasks.

Crossing the chasm. Jennifer Tejada, head of enterprise tech company PagerDuty, spoke with WSJLI President Alan Murray on the many shades of AI adoption. "We see a lot of effort right now across companies where the focus has been on efficiency, on automation, on creating capacity," she said. The most interesting examples, she said, are where companies "cross the chasm from simply doing things faster or smarter to transforming the way they attack something in service of growth."

WATCH 🎥 Jennifer Tejada on AI agents and enterprise technology. PagerDuty's CEO speaks on tech-industry leadership lessons for the age of AI.

Buckle up, AI investor. Laela Sturdy, managing partner of CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund, said investing in early-stage companies can be a wild ride. “So many of the most successful AI companies that we’re looking at this year…had negative gross margins, were burning significant amounts of capital” a year ago, Sturdy said.

WATCH 🎥 Investing in the age of AI. Sturdy offers advice for tech execs and discusses how AI is reshaping the investment landscape.

Americans’ time spent with technology is rising. Michael J. Wolf, founder and chief executive of Activate Consulting, predicts that people will spend an additional 15 minutes a day with technology by 2029, thanks to more multitasking and the increased adoption of wearables such as artificial-intelligence glasses.

WATCH 🎥 Michael J. Wolf on what’s next in AI. It's spatial computing.

WATCH 🎥 OpenAI Jony Ive device will be multimodal. Also on Wednesday, the WSJ's Sarah Krouse asked OpenAI's Sarah Friar about what kind of AI device people can expect from a collaboration between former Apple designer Jony Ive and OpenAI's Sam Altman.   

"So can we say goodbye to our phones when we use this mystery device?"

"I cannot say, Jony Ive will come and literally steal my children," Friar said. 

Shares in Snap soared in after-hours trading after it announced a deal to integrate Perplexity’s AI-powered answer engine directly into its social-media platform Snapchat, which has nearly one billion monthly active users. As part of the deal, Perplexity will pay Snap $400 million over a year starting in 2026, WSJ reports. 

Qualcomm swung to a loss in the fiscal fourth quarter following a large tax-related charge, but recorded a 10% increase in sales, WSJ reports.

Arm Holdings fiscal second-quarter profit more than doubled as revenue jumped, driven by demand for its compute platform, WSJ reports.

AI is improving ad targeting, helping to accelerate the tech companies’ control of the overall advertising market, the WSJ's Suzanne Vranica reports. The results defy the expectations of ad executives and buyers, who had expected an advertising slowdown in light of tariff battles and waning purchasing power among consumers facing higher prices for goods.

Here comes another new quantum computer. Quantinuum, the $10 billion firm that’s become one of the biggest players in quantum computing, unveiled Helios, its latest computer Wednesday.

“That’s why we call it Helios, because Helios is the sun, and we said this is dawning the commercial adoption phase of quantum computing in industry,” said Quantinuum President and Chief Executive Rajeeb Hazra.

Helios arrives in an increasingly competitive quantum landscape during a year marked by advances in hardware and software as well as renewed attention from Washington. 

Siri solved? Apple and Google are finalizing an agreement that would bring a custom version of the search giant’s Gemini AI model to Siri. Apple, which has struggled to bring many post-ChatGPT enhancements to Siri, could pay Google roughly $1 billion annually for access to its tech, Bloomberg reports.

Senators look to get a handle on AI job impact. A new bipartisan bill introduced by Sens. Mark Warner (D., Va.) and Josh Hawley (R., Mo.) would require that publicly traded companies and federal agencies file quarterly reports on hiring activity, including cuts or other workforce changes, as a result of AI, CNBC reports.

She's back. New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani announced Wednesday that Lina Khan, the former Federal Trade Commission chair during the Biden administration, would serve as a co-chair of his transition team. The move is unlikely to assuage concerns that his administration will carry out an agenda unfriendly to business, WSJ reports. At the FTC, Khan filed two big lawsuits against Amazon, including one that alleged its conduct raises prices.

The Federal Aviation Administration said it was ordering traffic to be reduced by 10% at 40 major airports while air-traffic controllers work without pay during the government shutdown. (WSJ)

President Trump’s global tariffs ran headlong into a skeptical Supreme Court on Wednesday, with justices across the spectrum expressing doubt that a 1970s emergency-powers law could be read to provide the president unilateral authority to remake the international economy and collect billions of dollars in import taxes without explicit congressional approval. (WSJ)

The United Parcel Service cargo plane that crashed Tuesday was 34 years old and needed a critical repair on its fuel tank in September. (WSJ)

The WSJ CIO Journal Team is Steven Rosenbush, Isabelle Bousquette and Belle Lin.

The editor, Tom Loftus, can be reached at thomas.loftus@wsj.com.