OpenAI is acquiring Jony Ive’s AI device startup, io, for $6.4 billion in an all-equity deal, marking its major push into hardware. I’ve will lead design efforts at both OpenAI and io, while io integrates with OpenAI’s San Francisco teams.

On May 21, 2025, OpenAI announced that it would acquire Jony Ive’s AI device startup, io, for roughly $6.4 billion in an all-equity transaction, solidifying the AI company’s entry into the hardware market.

The company said in a statement that Ive will be taking on “deep creative and design responsibilities across OpenAI and io.”  Ive and LoveFrom, his “creative collective,” will continue to operate independently. According to OpenAI, while io will be coming in-house.

Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a blog post on May 21 that Ive launched io a year ago with the help of Apple alums Scott Cannon, Tang Tan, and Evans Hankey, who temporarily filled Ive’s position at Apple after he left.

In order to collaborate more closely with the research, engineering, and product teams in San Francisco, the io team—which is dedicated to creating products that inspire, empower, and enable—will now join with OpenAI, according to the post.

OpenAI, which already controls 23% of the business, stated that it is paying $5 billion in the deal. Ive is “the greatest designer in the world,” according to Altman’s post on X.

This is by far OpenAI’s biggest acquisition to date, and it comes weeks after the business agreed to pay $3 billion to acquire the AI-assisted coding tool Windsurf. Before that, in 2024, OpenAI paid an unknown amount to purchase the analytics database startup Rockset.

To launch LoveFrom, Ive declared in 2019 that he was leaving Apple, where he had served as chief design officer for several years. In 2020, Airbnb announced that I had been advising the business on hiring and upcoming features. Last year, the New York Times revealed that LoveFrom’s designers were working on projects for Christie’s, Airbnb, and Ferrari at the time, and that the company’s clients pay it up to $200 million annually.

Ive and designer Marc Newson formed LoveFrom, according to the company’s website, but it makes no mention of io or what the business does. Apple’s most recognisable products, such as the iPod, iPhone, iPad, and MacBook Air, were all designed by Ive. Additionally, he contributed to the design of Apple Park, the company’s new Cupertino headquarters, which was started in 2004 and formally opened in 2019.

As competitors like Google, Anthropic, and Elon Musk’s xAI are making significant investments and frequently releasing new products, OpenAI, which was recently valued at $300 billion in a funding round spearheaded by Soft Bank, is scrambling to remain ahead of the competition in the generative AI space. Strengthening its hardware operations is one way to keep ahead of the competition.

To advance its hardware objectives, OpenAI in November named the former leader of Meta’s Orion augmented reality glasses project to lead its robotics and consumer hardware initiatives. The position would “initially focus on OpenAI’s robotics work and partnerships to help bring AI into the physical world and unlock its benefits for humanity,” according to a statement made at the time by Caitlin “CK” Kalinowski.

Additionally, in November, OpenAI invested $400 million at a valuation of $2.4 billion in Physical Intelligence, a robot company based in San Francisco.  Among the other investors was Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. By creating extensive AI models and algorithms to drive robots, the business aims to “bring general-purpose AI into the physical world,” according to its website.