OpenAI spent $34 billion in 2025, revealing massive losses ahead of planned IPO

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)