Audited financial documents reviewed by Ed Zitron’s Where’s Your Ed At and independently shown to the Financial Times show OpenAI is burning billions of dollars annually.
Per Zitron, OpenAI posted $13.07 billion in 2025 revenue against $34 billion in total costs and expenses, producing a net loss attributable to the company of $38.53 billion
That loss is roughly 7.5 times the $5.09 billion it lost in 2024 on $3.7 billion in revenue. “The financial condition of OpenAI is deeply concerning. $38.53 billion in losses are astronomical, and far higher than most believed it would be,” Zitron said in the blog post. “Losses also appear to be mounting year-over-year at a dramatic rate, and I’m not sure how this company finds a way toward any kind of sustainability or profitability.” OpenAI declined to comment to the FT. Where the money goes The documents break costs into categories that reveal how capital-intensive frontier inference has become. Cost of revenue, the line that captures serving model outputs to users, rose from $2.65 billion in 2024 to $7.5 billion in 2025.
Research and development jumped from $7.81 billion to $19.18 billion. Sales and marketing went from $1.11 billion to $5.73 billion. OpenAI spent $5.02 billion on inference with Microsoft Azure in the first half of 2025 alone.