Burning cash to buy growth! Leaked OpenAI documents reveal "operating losses of $20.9 billion," with profitability not expected until 2030.

As AI giant OpenAI actively prepares for its highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) and prepares to file documents with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), its mysterious financial black box has finally been opened. According to a recent report by Ars Technica on June 16, 2026, independent journalist Ed Zitron obtained a new audited financial document from OpenAI, revealing that this world's highest-valued AI startup is in an extreme phase of "burning money to buy growth."

Revenue surged threefold, but R&D expenses exceeded profits.

Leaked documents reveal that OpenAI has indeed made remarkable progress in commercialization. The company's total revenue more than tripled from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025; by the end of 2025, its monthly revenue was approaching $2 billion. Furthermore, ChatGPT's weekly active users surpassed 900 million, including approximately 50 million paying users.

However, the impressive revenue is completely insufficient to fill the bottomless pit of underlying computing power and model training costs. The report points out that OpenAI's "Research and Development (R&D) expenditure" in 2025 will reach a staggering $19.18 billion (compared to $7.81 billion in 2024), far exceeding its total annual revenue; of this, R&D and cloud computing power payments to Microsoft account for a staggering $10.59 billion. In addition, revenue costs, including inference computations, will surge to $7.5 billion, while sales and marketing expenses will climb to $5.73 billion.

Operating losses exceed $20 billion; profitability is not expected until 2030.

Caught between various high costs, OpenAI's operating loss in 2025 reached $20.92 billion, accounting for 160% of total revenue (an improvement compared to the $8.78 billion loss in 2024, which accounted for 237% of revenue, but the absolute amount increased significantly).

Regarding net loss, the reported figure for 2025 is nearly $39 billion, but the document specifically notes that approximately $30 billion of this is due to one-time accounting adjustments made to investor valuations when the company transitioned to a "for-profit structure." Excluding this non-recurring item, the actual net loss is approximately $8 billion. Faced with such a massive funding gap, OpenAI has admitted to investors that the company expects to achieve profitability no earlier than 2030 .

Faced with competitive pressure from Anthropic, Sora was shut down to stem the bleeding.

In addition to internal cost control pressures, OpenAI also faces severe challenges in the external market. The report analysis points out that enterprise customers are beginning to feel dissatisfied with the token-based pricing model and are strongly demanding a clear return on investment (ROI); at the same time, the strong rise of competitor Anthropic may force OpenAI to lower prices, which will further exacerbate its losses in the short term.

To stem the bleeding and concentrate resources, OpenAI reportedly shut down its once-sensational video generation model, "Sora," in March 2026 and cut several side projects, focusing its efforts on consolidating its core code generation and enterprise user market. Despite facing numerous challenges, thanks to its historic $122 billion funding round in March of this year, which valued the company at a staggering $852 billion, OpenAI still has ample funds to maintain its dominance in this AI arms race.

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