OpenAI buys Jony Ive's hardware startup for about $6.5 billion

OpenAI announced an all-equity acquisition of io, the hardware startup founded by former Apple chief design officer Jony Ive, in a deal reported to value the company at about $6.5 billion — OpenAI’s largest acquisition to date. Because OpenAI already held a roughly 23% stake in io from an earlier investment, the incremental cost of completing the deal was reported at closer to $5 billion.

Io’s approximately 55 staff — engineers, scientists, physicists and product specialists, many of them former Apple designers including Scott Cannon, Evans Hankey and Tang Tan — joined OpenAI as part of the deal. Ive and his independent design firm LoveFrom took charge of design work across OpenAI, with Ive retaining control of LoveFrom as a separate entity rather than folding it into OpenAI outright. Sam Altman described Ive as “imo the greatest designer in the world” and said the pair aimed to build “a new generation of AI-powered computers.”

The stated goal was a consumer device intended to move usage away from screens — smartphones and laptops — toward something built around conversational AI from the outset, with a first product targeted for 2026. The acquisition marked OpenAI’s most direct move into consumer hardware, following earlier reports that Ive and Altman had been collaborating informally since 2023, and set up a bet that a company with no history of shipping physical products could succeed where voice-first hardware attempts by others, including Humane’s AI Pin, had struggled commercially.