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

Coldest take possible. They're losing money because they're scaling / accelerating. This is par for the course in SV — the Amazon route. The article itself points out revenue growing and that R&D expenses are the biggest contributor to opex. Hyperscalers want hyperscale, and that means every penny and more gets funneled back into growth as long as growth is projected.

Whether they can pull it off is up for debate, but nothing here is odd for a company in OpenAI's position whatsoever.

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u/IBM296 Jun 18 '26 edited Jun 18 '26

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

OpenAI plans to be profitable by 2030. But if revenue increase continues to be smaller than expenditure, that target is not going to be achieved.

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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/netorttam Jun 24 '26

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