Jony Ive is back in the hardware game. Not with another iPhone or a new Apple campus. He is bringing his design sensibility to OpenAI.
The former Apple design chief co-founded the hardware start-up io. On May 21, 2025, OpenAI announced it has bought that company. The deal gives OpenAI Ive’s team and its expertise. It is a direct bet on building physical devices powered by artificial intelligence.
This is not a side project. OpenAI has spent years pushing software forward. It released ChatGPT in November 2022 and set off the AI boom. It built GPT, the family of large language models. It created DALL-E for images and Sora for video. All of that runs in the cloud, on screens, through keyboards. The io acquisition changes the equation. OpenAI now has the people to make hardware that fits in a hand.
What is at stake is control over how people actually interact with AI. Right now, that interaction happens through a browser or an app. The experience is mediated by existing devices built by Apple, Google, and Samsung. OpenAI wants its own device. It wants to design the interface from the plastic shell to the neural network inside.
Ive is the person who designed the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone, and the Apple Watch. He left Apple in 2019 and co-founded LoveFrom, a design collective. io was his next venture. Now it belongs to OpenAI. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed in the announcement.
OpenAI itself is an unusual organization. It was founded in 2015 in Delaware as a nonprofit. It later created a for-profit public benefit corporation, or PBC, as a subsidiary. That structure lets it raise capital and build products while keeping a nonprofit foundation as a partial controller. The io deal fits that strategy. It is a growth move that also carries the mission label.
The stakes are concrete. Hardware is hard. It requires supply chains, manufacturing partners, retail distribution, and customer support. OpenAI has none of that today. Ive has experience with all of it, but he has not built a device from scratch since leaving Apple. The risk is that a well-designed AI gadget arrives too late, costs too much, or does not solve a real problem.
The reward is bigger. The company that owns the hardware owns the relationship with the user. That means data, habits, and loyalty. It also means a moat. Software can be copied. A physical object with a custom chip and a unique industrial design is harder to replicate.
OpenAI has already shown it can move fast. ChatGPT went from research project to global product in months. The GPT models reshaped the industry. DALL-E and Sora pushed the boundaries of generative AI. The io acquisition suggests the next frontier is not a better language model. It is a box you pick up and talk to.
Ive’s reputation gives the project credibility. He made complex technology feel simple. That is exactly what AI needs. The technology is powerful but opaque. A device that makes it intuitive could change adoption rates. A device that fails could set the field back.
For now, the deal is done. The team is in place. The design work is likely already underway. The question is whether OpenAI can deliver a piece of hardware that matters as much as its software already does.
