tech
Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year
Audited accounting shows growing revenues being dwarfed by R&D, other expenses.
TL;DR
- OpenAI's revenue is projected to grow from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025.
- Research and development expenses alone reached $19.18 billion in 2025, including $10.59 billion paid to Microsoft.
- Cost of revenue increased to $7.5 billion in 2025 due to significant compute costs for user prompts.
- Sales and marketing costs grew from $1.11 billion in 2024 to $5.73 billion in 2025.
- The operating loss increased from $8.78 billion in 2024 to $20.92 billion in 2025.
- The reported net loss for 2025 was nearly $39 billion, but excluding a $30 billion accounting charge, it was approximately $8 billion.
- OpenAI faces challenges from enterprise customers demanding ROI and potential price reductions due to competition from Anthropic.
- The company has over 900 million weekly active users of ChatGPT, with 50 million paid subscribers.