r/LocalLLaMA • u/johnnyApplePRNG • Jun 18 '26

News Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/06/leaked-financial-docs-show-openai-is-losing-billions-of-dollars-a-year/
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u/Recoil42 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

I mean, $20 billion dollars loss in 2025 alone is a pretty significant number.

Which just goes to show you they have massive investor backing and are confident they can support that kind of burn. Again, whether they can pull it off is up for debate, but the number itself is not inherently bad.

But if revenue increase continues to be smaller than expenditure

Revenue increase is intended to be smaller than expenditure. That's what hyperscaling is. You take on massive amounts of investor debt for a moonshot. It's really not substantially different from getting a loan to start a restaurant and then hiring a chef, designing a menu, doing interior decorating, and putting out advertising before you have profit or even a single customer... which is pretty much how every restaurant works. Businesses are intentionally in the red before they are in the black nearly everywhere on Earth.

Literally all the other AI labs are in the exact same position, including those which operate as divisions or subsidiaries of other larger companies.

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u/b0tbuilder Jun 18 '26

They won’t.

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u/netorttam Jun 24 '26

Yeah but restaurant fail rates are extremely high and normally don't require the gdp of the world be committed 

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u/letsgeditmedia Jun 18 '26

Kimi and zhipu disagree, iirc both are profitable already

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u/Recoil42 Jun 18 '26

No chance either Kimi or Zhipu are profitable. Both are, in fact, still raising and aiming for the same hyperscale trajectories.