OpenAI's Revenues and Expenditures: Facts Are Coming To Light

New Information About OpenAI's Financial Situation

In the past year, intense deal traffic and rumors of an impending IPO have led to increased financial scrutiny regarding OpenAI. Leaked documents obtained by tech blogger Ed Zitron provide more insight into OpenAI's revenue and computing costs over the past few years.

Zitron reported this week that Microsoft received $493.8 million in revenue share from OpenAI in 2024. This figure is expected to rise to $865.8 million in the first three quarters of 2025.

OpenAI is said to have shared 20% of its revenue with Microsoft as part of a previous agreement. Microsoft had invested more than $13 billion as part of this agreement. However, neither party has publicly confirmed these percentages.

Things get a bit complicated here because Microsoft also shares revenue with OpenAI, returning about 20% of the revenue generated from Bing and Azure OpenAI Service to OpenAI. Bing is powered by OpenAI, and OpenAI Service sells cloud access to OpenAI's models for developers and businesses.

The leaked documents contain information that reflects Microsoft's net revenue share, not gross revenue share. In other words, payments Microsoft makes to OpenAI through Bing and Azure are not included in these figures. According to the source, Microsoft excludes these amounts from revenue share calculations in its internal reports.

Since Microsoft does not disclose how much revenue it earns from Bing and Azure OpenAI in its financial statements, estimating these figures is challenging.

Nevertheless, the leaked documents provide a glimpse into the activities of one of today’s most popular companies in private markets. They shed light on how much revenue OpenAI has been making, as well as how much it has been spending compared to this revenue.

Based on the reported 20% revenue sharing rate, we conclude that OpenAI's revenue for 2024 is at least $2.5 billion, and it could reach $4.33 billion in the first three quarters of 2025; this figure could be even higher. The Information previously reported that OpenAI's revenue for 2024 is approximately $4 billion. The revenue for the first six months of 2025 is estimated to be $4.3 billion.

Altman stated that OpenAI's revenue is “well above the $13 billion reported, and by the end of the year, its annual revenue rate will exceed $20 billion, with a target of $100 billion by 2027.

According to Zitron’s analysis, OpenAI spent approximately $3.8 billion in 2024, which increased to around $8.65 billion in the first nine months of 2025. Inference refers to the computing resources required for an AI model to generate responses.

OpenAI has historically provided computing access almost entirely via Microsoft Azure. However, it has recently signed agreements with CoreWeave, Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud as well.

Previous reports had estimated OpenAI's total computing expenditures for 2024 to be around $5.6 billion. The “cost of revenue” for the first half of 2025 was determined to be $2.5 billion.

One source reported that most of OpenAI's training expenses are non-cash, meaning they were paid with credits provided by Microsoft as part of its investment. It is worth noting that training refers to the computing resources required to initially train the model.

Although not a complete picture, these figures suggest that OpenAI may be spending more on inference costs than it is earning in revenue. This situation is likely to amplify ongoing discussions about the ever-growing AI bubble whispers, echoing from New York City to Silicon Valley.

If OpenAI is indeed running at a loss while operating its models, how might this impact significant investments being made with striking valuations in other AI companies?

OpenAI did not accept comments on the matter. Microsoft did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment.