OpenAI's full-year 2025 audited results paint a picture of rapid revenue growth that still falls far short of covering its ballooning expenses, leaving a substantial operating loss even before non-operating adjustments tied to its shift toward for-profit status.
apparently ed proved inference is VERY profitable, and the companies, in fact, do not lose money on subscriptions.
Exclusive: I have seen OpenAI's audited financials for 2024 and 2025.
In 2025, OpenAI had $13.07 billion in revenue and $34 billion in costs. $867 million of its revenue came from SoftBank, and $303 million came from Microsoft. https://www.wheresyoured.at/exclusive-openai-financials/
Nearly half the $34 billion in total costs went to research and development, including $10.59 billion paid to Microsoft for infrastructure, while sales and marketing added another $5.73 billion.
The figures surface just as OpenAI holds roughly $25 billion in cash and equivalents, yet no verified schedule or valuation details have been released to connect these 2025 results directly to a planned public offering.
Negative users dismiss OpenAI's 2025 financials as unsustainable, arguing the $34B costs versus $13B revenue show a land grab rather than a viable business model ahead of IPO.
No Digg Deeper questions have been answered for this story yet.
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
you can find estimates on what fraction of revenue OAI has been receiving from subs as compared to API, this has been reported and is based on leaked docs/financials.
GPT-5.5 pro estimates ~75% of revenue came from subs, based on reports from FT and The Information. Excluding enterprise seats, it predicts 65%.
65% * 13.07=$8.5B, which, as you can check via Google or your favourite LLM, is bigger than $7.5B
@mooncat_is this is his core belief that he publicly held onto until halfway through '25. he just switched his line to financials after this became publicly untenable, while keeping his conclusion the same
"stripping out stock based comp and the value of compute credits" why on earth would you do that if you wanted to learn if OpenAI has a profitable business model?
For now at least, they do in fact need to pay their staff, and compute is not free.
Not to say Zitron isn't a charlatan (he is) but that's equally silly.
@stalkermustang Да они at cost сервят в среднем подписки и на апи накрутка огромная. Но вот с другой стороны, а в какой степени стоимость тренинга и масштаб инференса функция от экономической полезности? Точно точно перевесит прибыль от инференса стоимость r&d?
@mooncat_is i think his point is that exponential growth of losses is a bad business and that altman lied
@LeveragedFun @stalkermustang which is fine if they keep doing R&D
there are many wildly successful companies that have IPOd and took several years after to get to profitability
@stalkermustang then they might still lose on subs and profit from api
@stalkermustang If you don't pay your employees, your rent and you receive the model training free, then you don't lose money on inference!
https://chatgpt.com/s/t_6a312526d0308191b6189d2ff5319f3b
pro ext estimates for those who are curious, with 3 scenarios
The lower bound is 7b for all subs, which is lower than 7.5b, but the inference for all of API + free users is more than $0.5b/year (otherwise Ed & co would have to agree that the markup is like 1000% or thereabouts)
@Yoloknabe @ShakeelHashim Cash burn doesn't really matter, they empirically can raise as much as they want to, and whether investors get diluted by cash raised or by stock based comp or by compute credits raised (also by issuing stock) makes basically no economic difference.
@thewhiteboxAI > (otherwise Ed & co would have to agree that the markup is like 1000% or thereabouts)
Which... would again kill the whole argument of unsustainable business, because API is soaring (subs are shrinking), meaning (rev-compute) is veeeery positive
@dh44t or you can start reading what's written. Ur choice
@stalkermustang Frontier model biz seems to be infinitely loss making. If model intelligence scales sort of linear with input costs, then capex just keeps going up to reach new frontier. Inference is probably good business at the frontier but commoditized for earlier models.
@stalkermustang @dh44t Even if you deduct the R&D budget they're still losing money. And none of these labs can make money for long unless they keep dumping that way.
You can't just remove Admin and Marketing budgets.
@stalkermustang and how many free users does meta serve with 80% gross margins?
@CharlesD353 @ShakeelHashim Is stock-based comp expected to continue indefinitely post-IPO?
@thewhiteboxAI @stalkermustang My intuition is $100/month and $200/month subscriptions make money overall even if a small portion of users on them (myself included) manage to get $1,000s in equivalent API value out of them
Like an all-you-can-eat buffet I expect the number of users who beat the system is tiny
@sam90860759 that's not what's written in the post, you cunt. But I'm not surprised you can't read.
@mooncat_is thats not the point though
