OpenAI has hit a revenue milestone that would make most startup founders pop champagne bottles: a staggering $10 billion annualized run rate as of June. That's nearly doubled from $5.5 billion just six months earlier.
And yet.
The company somehow managed to lose about $5 billion last year. If that sounds like financial contradictions that shouldn't coexist, welcome to the bizarre economics of AI's frontrunners.
I've covered tech financials for years, and this growth rate simply doesn't happen in normal business contexts. It's unprecedented—the kind of trajectory reserved for companies that have either discovered actual magic or are riding the absolute peak of a technological tsunami. OpenAI is definitely the latter.
Think of it this way: Sam Altman and company have essentially built a money cannon that fires with spectacular force in two directions simultaneously. Cash rushes in at a rate that would make traditional SaaS executives question their life choices, while simultaneously gushing out to pay for the mind-boggling computational infrastructure making ChatGPT possible.
It's like watching someone construct a perpetual motion machine that... actually works? Except it requires billions in venture capital to keep the "perpetual" part going.
What's particularly telling is that the $10 billion figure doesn't even include Microsoft licensing revenue or other large one-time deals. This means the core business—subscriptions and API usage—is growing at a pace that defies conventional business metrics.
For a bit of perspective (that's honestly a bit depressing for everyone else in tech), Salesforce took roughly 15 years to hit $10 billion in annual revenue. OpenAI? About 2.5 years since launching ChatGPT.
The traditional narrative around AI companies positioned them as essentially research labs with business models hastily stapled on as afterthoughts. OpenAI seems determined to flip that script, showing you can both burn money at terrifying rates AND generate it at even more impressive ones.
Meanwhile, Anthropic (makers of Claude and OpenAI's most direct competitor) recently crossed $3 billion in annualized revenue. In literally any other business context, this would be front-page news. In today's AI arms race? It's barely a footnote.
Look, there's a model I often use when thinking about hypergrowth tech companies—I call it the cash furnace theory. Some companies, like Amazon in its early days, built enormous cash furnaces that consumed capital but generated ever-increasing heat (revenue) until eventually becoming self-sustaining. Others, like WeWork, constructed furnaces that looked impressive but never generated enough heat to justify the fuel being shoveled in.
OpenAI has built perhaps the most spectacular cash furnace Silicon Valley has ever witnessed. The question hanging over everything: is it more like Amazon circa 1999, or... something else entirely?
With a recent funding round valuing the company at approximately $300 billion—roughly equivalent to Finland's entire GDP—investors are clearly betting on the former.
The scale here is worth dwelling on. 500 million weekly active users is nothing to sneeze at. That's more people than the entire United States population using your product every week. At that scale, finding paths to profitability seems less like a question of "if" and more like "when" (though the "when" part remains frustratingly vague).
I spoke with several industry analysts who confirmed what many have suspected—the real test for OpenAI won't be hitting astronomical revenue targets, which they're clearly managing just fine. It's demonstrating that the fundamental economics of AI eventually bend toward profitability rather than just bigger losses paired with bigger revenues.
Getting to $10 billion in revenue while losing half that amount is impressive in its way (sort of?), but shareholders eventually expect that gap to close from both ends.
In the meantime, Altman and team can certainly enjoy their status as the fastest-growing tech company of this AI era. The money printer is working beautifully—now they just need to fix that pesky money shredder operating right alongside it.
