Opinion by: Jesus Rodriguez, co-founder of Sentora
OpenAI is close to the point where launching its own crypto token is a realistic, and perhaps inevitable, financing move, although OpenAI has not announced any such plans. This idea might not be as crazy as it sounds.
The scale of OpenAI’s recent trillion-dollar-scale compute deals, combined with Sam Altman’s long-running interest in crypto primitives, makes a tokenized financing instrument a very real possibility. If models are engines that turn compute into intelligence, tokens may be the fuel markets use to price that compute in real time.
OpenAI’s appetite for compute now rivals nation-state infrastructure. At the time of this writing, OpenAI has approximately $13 billion in revenue and around $1.4 trillion in compute commitments. The mismatch requires some level of financial creativity.
A crypto token, structured pragmatically as prepaid compute plus optional upside, could become the financing primitive that matches this demand curve without sacrificing strategic control. Altman has repeatedly hinted that OpenAI’s ambitions will require alternative forms of finance, even teasing “a very interesting new kind of financial instrument.”
Given his visible crypto trajectory, an OpenAI crypto token may be controversial, but it’s entirely feasible when framed as prepaid compute with tightly scoped rights.
Trillion-dollar compute deals might require a new capital stack
The modern large language model (LLM) stack follows simple scaling laws. More compute leads to better models, which lead to more users, and even more compute. OpenAI is now operating at the steep part of that curve. Training runs span months, inference is always on and the capex profile resembles building a new cloud every year.
That’s why we’re seeing mega-deals: multi-year GPU purchase commitments, data-center buildouts, equity-for-chips partnerships and large credit facilities anchored by hyperscalers and chipmakers.
Microsoft has layered an incremental $250 billion of Azure commitments on top of its equity stake, while Oracle has emerged as a flagship partner through the Stargate program, with reports indicating $300 billion of Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) capacity over five years.
Amazon has joined the stack with a seven-year, $38 billion Amazon Web Services (AWS) agreement, and GPU-native cloud CoreWeave has stitched together a three-stage contract now totaling $22.4 billion in infrastructure.
On the silicon side, OpenAI has a letter of intent with Nvidia to deploy at least 10 gigawatts of systems alongside up to $100 billion in Nvidia investment, a six-gigawatt multi-generation deal for AMD Instinct GPUs, and a 10-gigawatt co-development program with Broadcom for custom accelerators in addition to undisclosed capacity being lined up across Google Cloud and other partners.
Collectively, these arrangements add up to a trillion-dollar-scale bet on future compute cycles, financed through opaque, vendor-linked contracts that behave more like exotic infrastructure derivatives than traditional cloud bills, which is precisely the kind of structure a liquid, tokenized compute credit could help normalize and expose to market pricing.
We’ve already seen the cohelp normalize and expose to market pricing. Chips effectively become capital when long-dated GPU supply agreements function like asset-backed financing: They drive unit costs down and guarantee capacity, but at the price of massive forward obligations tied to training roadmaps.
Furthermore, equity-for-chips structures, where vendors take an upside in OpenAI’s equity in exchange for a preferential allocation, push financing risk deeper into the supply chain and tightly couple product trajectories to hardware roadmaps.
Then there are the cloud pre-pays and build-transfer arrangements, in which hyperscalers front data center capital expenditures in return for platform exclusivity and a revenue share, swapping near-term cash relief for long-term platform lock-in.
These deals underscore a new pattern: Compute is financed via multi-cycle, vendor-linked contracts that behave like long-dated capex, exactly the kind of lumpy commitment that a market-priced tokenized credit could smooth.
Crypto was built for elastic, global coordination. A token can continuously price demand, pool capital across geographies and settle instantly, features hard to replicate with conventional equity or debt.
What a pragmatic OpenAI token could be
Think less memecoin and more instrument. A pragmatic OpenAI token could fit into one of three design patterns, if pursued. The first is a pure compute credit token: a transferable claim on future inference or training time, essentially onchain credits redeemable on approved endpoints.
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This version simply presells capacity, ties token demand to real model usage and sidesteps quasi-equity semantics; redemption could be indexed to a public metered schedule (tokens per second of specific models).
A second variant is a tokenized funding note: a capped-profit, revenue-linked claim paid in fiat or credits but wrapped as a token for global distribution and secondary liquidity. Coupons might reference API revenue or particular product cohorts and convert into compute credits under stress, channeling speculative pressure into actual usage and reducing misalignment.
A compute token would not just sit quietly on the balance sheet. It would plug OpenAI into a reflexive market loop. When the token trades at a high value, capital is cheap, more clusters are built, models improve and demand for compute rises, supporting the token price. When the token sells off, that loop works in reverse, creating the AI-native version of a bank run: a “run on compute,” where collapsing token prices signal doubts about future model economics long before they show up in revenue.
This also changes the power balance with hyperscalers and chip vendors. Today, they control pricing and allocation through opaque, long-term contracts. A liquid compute price set in the open market would make it harder for any single vendor to extract outsized rents, and would force them to work around the token, adopt it (for collateral or payment) or launch their own competing compute assets. The real game, in that world, is not just whether crypto markets embrace an OpenAI token, but how quickly the existing compute oligopoly decides to copy or weaponize it.
The token punchline
Tokens are not a religion; they are a tool. OpenAI’s problem is not capital in abstract, it is scheduling capital against the geometry of compute. Crypto provides a programmable balance sheet, enabling you to price minutes, pre-sell access and source liquidity from the internet at the speed your models evolve.
If the company continues to sign increasingly complex chips-as-capital deals and revenue-sharing cloud agreements, a tokenized compute credit is the logical third leg, one that turns the market into a load balancer for intelligence.
If AI is gradients over data, financing should be gradients over demand. The next breakthrough may not just be a better optimizer, it may be a better way to fund it.
Opinion by: Jesus Rodriguez, co-founder of Sentora.
This opinion article presents the contributor’s expert view and it may not reflect the views of Cointelegraph.com. This content has undergone editorial review to ensure clarity and relevance, Cointelegraph remains committed to transparent reporting and upholding the highest standards of journalism. Readers are encouraged to conduct their own research before taking any actions related to the company.
