OpenAI spent $34 billion in 2025 as losses mount ahead of planned IPO

OpenAI made $13 billion in 2025 and lost $21 billion doing it

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Bottom line: OpenAI's latest financial disclosures highlight a fundamental tension in the AI boom. The technology is scaling rapidly, but the cost of building and running it is rising even faster. The documents, obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron, arrive as the company moves toward a possible IPO and reveal just how expensive modern AI systems have become. They portray a business generating billions of dollars in revenue while remaining burdened by even larger technology-related expenses. Revenue growth has been dramatic. OpenAI generated $3.7 billion in revenue in 2024 before jumping to $13.07 billion in 2025. By the end of that year, monthly revenue was approaching $2 billion, suggesting demand continued to accelerate. OpenAI says ChatGPT now has more than 900 million weekly users, though only about 50 million subscribe to paid tiers. But the financials make it clear that scale alone does not translate into efficiency. The cost of developing AI models continues to outpace everything else. Research and development spending increased from $7.81 billion in 2024 to $19.18 billion in 2025 - a figure that, by itself, exceeded the company's total annual revenue in both years. Those figures likely reflect the enormous cost of training new models and the payments OpenAI makes to its infrastructure partners. In 2025, $10.59 billion of the company's R&D spending went to Microsoft. Even after the models are trained, the costs do not ease. Running them at scale - the constant stream of user prompts and responses - is proving just as expensive. OpenAI's cost of revenue climbed from $2.65 billion in 2024 to $7.5 billion in 2025, a year-over-year increase that likely reflects rising inference costs. Every interaction carries a compute cost, and at current usage levels, those expenses add up quickly. Credit: Ars Technica The company is also spending heavily to maintain its position in an increasingly competitive market. Sales and marketing expenses rose from $1.11 billion to $5.73 billion in a single year, underscoring how aggressively OpenAI is trying to expand its user base. Even so, the bottom line remains deeply negative. Operating losses widened from $8.78 billion in 2024 to $20.92 billion in 2025, despite the company's surging revenue. The 2025 net loss figure - nearly $39 billion - appears especially stark, though it is somewhat misleading. A large portion of that total stems from a one-time accounting adjustment tied to changes in investor valuations following OpenAI's transition to a for-profit structure. Excluding that adjustment brings the loss closer to $8 billion, a figure that better reflects the company's underlying operations. Taken together, the numbers highlight a fundamental challenge facing the AI industry: the technology is not only expensive to build, but also expensive to operate continuously at scale. That reality is already shaping internal decisions. OpenAI has moved away from several initiatives, including the shutdown of its Sora video model earlier this year. Around the same time, the company's leadership signaled a tighter focus on core products, particularly those aimed at developers and business users. Credit: Ars Technica There are also signs that revenue growth could come under pressure. Some enterprise customers are pushing back against token-based pricing and demanding clearer returns on their AI investments. At the same time, competition is intensifying. Rivals like Anthropic are putting pressure on pricing, which could squeeze margins, especially if subscription prices decline. Even so, investor confidence has not wavered. OpenAI raised $122 billion in March at a valuation of $852 billion, marking one of the largest funding rounds in the sector. The company has told investors it hopes to become profitable by 2030, a goal that will depend in part on lowering training and inference costs. For now, the financial picture reflects a company still in build-out mode. Demand remains strong and continues to grow rapidly. The harder question - one these documents bring into sharper focus - is how long that growth can continue to outpace the cost of the infrastructure required to support it.

OpenAI Is Growing Fast. Its Losses Are Growing Faster

Noted AI critic and bubble watch enthusiast Ed Zitron has been teasing a major scoop for days, and we finally got it: He seems to have gotten his hands on OpenAI's financial documents and found the company has been burning through cash at an astronomical rate -- significantly more than had been reported previously. The figures were verified by the Financial Times, which seemed less alarmed than Zitron. Zitron found that OpenAI lost around $38.5 billion in 2025, a massive uptick in burn rate from the company's $5.09 billion in 2024. He also found that the company, while growing its revenue, is still struggling to make good on the promise of being a trillion-dollar company. In 2024, the company generated $3.7 billion in revenue, which jumped to $13.07 billion in 2025. For what it's worth, OpenAI previously claimed to achieve $20 billion in annualized revenue in 2025. That difference could probably be chalked up to funky business math, and there's a lot of that going on in this story. As Zitron notes, OpenAI actually had a net loss of $60.35 billion in 2025, but marked down about $17.87 billion of that to "net loss attributable to noncontrolling members capital." The company also experienced a $41.55 billion loss related to its conversion from a non-profit to a for-profit entity, a decision that landed it in a very dumb lawsuit with co-founder Elon Musk that amounted to nothing. The Financial Times explained that, under US accounting rules, investors in OpenAI received convertible interest rights when the company made the switch, and those interests went on the company's ledger as liabilities, hence the loss. FT also cited a person apparently familiar with OpenAI's financial situation and concluded that OpenAI's losses for 2025 were closer to $8 billion once you strip out all of the stuff that should be one-time costs. That's certainly a friendlier interpretation of the situation, though it doesn't totally explain away what is unquestionably an astronomical burn rate for OpenAI, which Zitron found forked over $17.2 billion to Microsoft for expenses in 2025, including nearly $10.5 billion specifically set aside for "research and development" expenses, likely related to training new OpenAI models. One way or another, OpenAI's losses are growing. It's revenue is also up, but it's not clear whether it's growing at a rate that can support the sheer amount of cash that the company is shoveling into furnaces right now to expand its operation and train its models. Remember, this is a company that, on paper, has pledged (though not actually spent) $1 trillion on data center buildouts. It's possible for the company to both be growing its revenue extremely quickly and also not generating nearly enough to keep up with its expenditures. With OpenAI set to go public later this year, we'll likely get a much clearer look at its financial situation before long. Of course, it might not matter much when it comes to how the market values it. SpaceX isn't profitable and is banking on putting one million people on Mars as a potential revenue generator, and yet the market is pumping that stock up. We're currently in a market where theoretical profit is worth more than actual profit. In that world, real losses probably don't matter.

OpenAI spent $34bn last year as it lines up for an IPO

Revenue of $13bn beat the company's own target. It still spent nearly three dollars for every one it took in. OpenAI spent $34bn in 2025, more than two and a half times what it took in, as it prepares to file for one of the largest public listings ever attempted. The figure, reported by the Financial Times, lays out in stark terms what the race to build frontier AI now costs the company leading it. The breakdown is roughly what one would expect from a firm trying to outspend everyone else into a lead. About $19bn went on research and development, the FT reported, and close to $6bn on sales and marketing, with the rest spread across the infrastructure and staffing that running models at scale demands. Against that, revenue came in at $13bn, ahead of the company's own internal target of $10bn. The gap between those two numbers is the entire story of OpenAI's present moment. Revenue is growing fast and beating plan, and the company is still losing money on a scale that would be fatal for almost any business not sitting on this much committed capital. Beating a $10bn target is the kind of result a normal company celebrates. Spending $34bn to get there is the kind of result only an AI lab can absorb. OpenAI has the capital because investors keep supplying it. The company closed a $122bn funding round at an $852bn valuation earlier this year, the largest private raise on record, backed by SoftBank, Nvidia, and more than two dozen others. That valuation is itself under scrutiny from some of OpenAI's own backers, one of whom told the FT that underwriting the round meant assuming an eventual public valuation north of $1.2tn. Which is where the IPO comes in. OpenAI has filed confidentially with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and is preparing to go public, targeting a valuation of up to $1tn. A listing at that level would rank among the biggest in history. The spending figures now in circulation are, in effect, the first detailed look at what a prospective shareholder would be buying. The harder number to read is the loss. Reporting on the leaked financials has put OpenAI's 2025 net loss at around $39bn, widened by restructuring and other non-cash charges; stripped of those, the operating loss appears closer to $8bn. The two figures tell different stories, and which one matters most will depend on how much of the larger number proves to be one-off rather than structural. OpenAI has not published audited accounts, and the company declined to comment on the leaked figures. What is not in dispute is the trajectory of the spend. OpenAI has told investors it expects to commit roughly $600bn to AI infrastructure through 2030. The $34bn spent last year, on that horizon, is an early instalment.

OpenAI spending hit $34 billion last year ahead of planned IPO: Report

Audited ⁠financial figures show the ChatGPT ⁠maker spent about $19 billion on research and development in 2025 and nearly $6 billion on sales and marketing, as well ⁠as other costs, the report said. OpenAI spent $34 billion last year to dominate the booming AI ⁠market ⁠ahead of its planned IPO, the Financial Times reported on Monday. Audited ⁠financial figures show the ChatGPT ⁠maker spent about $19 billion on research and development in 2025 and nearly $6 billion on sales and marketing, as well ⁠as other costs, the report said. (Reporting by Shivani Tanna in Bengaluru; Editing by Sonia Cheema)