Stripe says 'the singularity has begun' as H1 revenue surges 41%
Stripe told investors this week that January 1 marked the "beginning of the singularity" — and backed the claim with a 41% year-over-year revenue jump in the first half of 2026.
The fintech giant's investor letter frames AI as the next economic infrastructure layer. Patrick Collison's company sent the letter alongside its announcement to acquire OpenRouter for $7.5 billion, calling tokens "the new currency of intelligence capital." The letter argues that every business will soon need to manage both revenue flows and token flows, positioning Stripe as the bridge between traditional payments and the emerging AI economy. H1 revenue rose 41% YoY, though Stripe did not disclose absolute figures. The acquisition of OpenRouter — the world's leading AI model marketplace, processing over 10 trillion tokens daily across 400+ models — gives Stripe a direct stake in routing the inference traffic that Collison believes will define the next decade of commerce.
The "singularity" framing is bold even by Silicon Valley standards. Collison isn't talking about superintelligence — he's using the term to describe the inflection point where AI becomes economically structural, the way the internet did in the late 1990s. The fact that Stripe chose this moment to make its largest acquisition ever suggests the company sees AI infrastructure as its next major growth vector, not a side project.
OpenAI CFO tells employees the company will go public by 2027. Sarah Friar reportedly told staff at an all-hands meeting that OpenAI "will be a public company in 2027," or sooner if business continues to inflect. The timeline comes alongside strong Q2 internals: revenue run rate up 35% quarter-to-date, enterprise revenue up 50%, and Codex — OpenAI's AI coding tool — now has 20 million weekly active users. API tokens per minute have doubled quarter-to-date. But the numbers also reveal a gap: while OpenAI's Q2 sales grew 18% quarter-over-quarter to $6.7 billion, its loss jumped 32% to $12.3 billion. Meanwhile, Anthropic's sales more than doubled to $11.6 billion as it swung to a small operating profit, underscoring the competitive pressure that's likely driving OpenAI's IPO urgency.
What do you think — is Stripe right that tokens are becoming the new dollars? Tell us in the comments.
Sources: Axios · Stripe · OpenRouter Blog · CNBC · CNBC (OpenAI IPO) · Wall Street Journal
