OpenAI's Leaked Financials: How Much Did They Really Earn?
It's no secret that OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has been making waves. After a whirlwind year filled with deals and whispers of an IPO, everyone's eager to know how the company's finances really look like. And now, some leaked documents are giving us a clearer picture, especially regarding revenue and those hefty computing costs.
So, what did these documents reveal? Well, in 2024, Microsoft apparently received almost $500 million in revenue share from OpenAI. And get this: in just the first three quarters of 2025, that number shot up to over $865 million! It seems like Microsoft gets a 20% cut of OpenAI's revenue as part of their massive investment deal. But here's the twist – Microsoft also shares some of its revenue with OpenAI from Bing and Azure OpenAI Service. It's like a financial merry-go-round!
These payments to Microsoft are net revenue share, not the total amount, which doesn't include what Microsoft pays OpenAI from Bing and Azure OpenAI royalties. Microsoft takes those numbers out of its internally reported revenue share numbers.
Microsoft doesn't disclose the numbers for Bing and Azure OpenAI, making it difficult to estimate how much the tech giant is giving back.
The Revenue Picture
If we use that 20% revenue share, we can guess that OpenAI made at least $2.5 billion in 2024 and a whopping $4.33 billion in the first nine months of 2025. But here's the thing: those numbers could be even higher. For example, Altman mentioned that OpenAI's revenue is way more than the reported $13 billion yearly and could even reach $100 billion by 2027! Of course, that's just a prediction, not a promise. However, if you ask me, I think that such quick adoption on new technologies and the constant hype on AI, makes these values achievable.
However, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. See, OpenAI is also spending a ton of money. In 2024, they might have spent nearly $4 billion on "inference" – that's the computing power needed to actually run the AI models. And in the first nine months of 2025, that cost ballooned to $8.65 billion! That's a lot of cash!
Inference spending refers to the computational resources consumed when running a trained AI model to generate responses or make predictions. I think that this expense is really impacting OpenAI.
OpenAI has primarily depended on Microsoft Azure for computing power, but they've also partnered with other providers like CoreWeave, Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud. But the big question is, are they spending more than they're earning? It's possible.
And this brings us to the bigger picture. If OpenAI, one of the biggest players in the AI game, is still potentially losing money running its models, what does that mean for all the other AI companies out there? Are we in an AI bubble that's about to burst? Only time will tell, but these leaked documents certainly give us something to think about.
Source: TechCrunch