The company secured $665 billion in compute commitments through 2030.
scoop: OpenAI burned through $3.7 billion in the first quarter, more than half its $5.7 billion in revenue. Its first quarter operating loss was $9.3 billion, and net loss was $21.3 billion, although that was skewed by a $12.4 billion accounting charge https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-burned-3-7-billion-first-three-months-2026?rc=n9lbpq
Many users criticized OpenAI's massive cash burn despite strong revenue as unsustainable, pointing to open-source competition and lack of a viable path to profitability.
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#1360OpenAI’s IPO story is going to be interesting.
Q1 2026: $5.7B revenue $3.7B cash burn $9.3B operating loss $665B in compute commitments through 2030
AI demand is obviously real. But the business model is still: burn insane amounts of money to buy enough compute to stay frontier. The comparison with Anthropic will be tough.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-burned-3-7-billion-first-three-months-2026?rc=bfliih
OpenAI’s IPO story is going to be interesting.
Q1 2026: $5.7B revenue $3.7B cash burn $9.3B operating loss $665B in compute commitments through 2030
AI demand is obviously real. But the business model is still: burn insane amounts of money to buy enough compute to stay frontier. The comparison with Anthropic will be tough.
FT: OpenAI is growing fast, but its numbers show how expensive frontier AI has become.
They are spending $34B last year to buy compute, talent, and distribution.
The company booked about $13B in revenue, but spent about $19B on R&D and nearly $6B on sales and marketing.
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ft .com/content/e15b0d7e-ff6b-4f16-ba7a-4068feddb828?syn-25a6b1a6=1
@erinkwoo
@erinkwoo Palantir barely makes that in 3 quarters $PLTR should be trading at $2 goofy and uneducated CEO
@erinkwoo Wait didn't I read this earlier via Ed Zitron's scoop?
@kimmonismus not at all sustainable, open source or get open sourced...chinese open models are coming for them 🚀
@kimmonismus I'm very confused about what their strategy is tbh. Back when they had the first mover advantage the approach of spreading out and trying to capture everything might have made sense, but right now they're just losing on all fronts it seems
@kimmonismus why do you think claude are surpassing openai in growth? I tried claude code for fable when it came out but even when i was using a older llm like opus 4.7 my limit would hit way faster than codex.
@kimmonismus At some point they will achieve such powerful models that they will print money in 100 different ways
@erinkwoo Ohhhh my bad sorry, I re-read and I see what's happening, Zitron is reporting on 24 + 25 and this is 26
@vishalsingh2972 GLM-5.2 was such a big release yesterday!
@rohanpaul_ai That gap between revenue and compute spend is the real story behind every "free" or cheap AI product right now. It shows just how heavy the centralized infrastructure bill actually is.
@rohanpaul_ai This is exactly what critics pointed out a year back but people were more hyped about AI and selling prospective growth to consider expenses.
@rohanpaul_ai The product subsidizes the research, not the reverse. That holds only while capability jumps outpace commoditizing inference. At $34B capex, that window is narrower than the top-line growth implies.
@kimmonismus at least OpenAI IPO can be interesting than SpaceX IPO
just imho
@kimmonismus with the current stage where open source beating benchmarks, open ai and claude are gonna suffer heavily. until they introduce something really interne breaking which anyone can't replicate
@kimmonismus
@kimmonismus True, i think it might take a few years
@kimmonismus It depends what the money was spent on. Thers a difference in what was spend on feature models vs what was spent on current offering, if they show profit on curent offering, high demand, then a lot of investments for the next generation is not problematic.
