SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI is on track to generate more than $40 billion in annualized revenue based on current performance, roughly double its run rate from late 2025, according to people familiar with the company's financials.
The growth supports OpenAI's plans for an initial public offering. As of the end of July, the company had topped $25 billion in annualized revenue. In March 2025, that figure stood at approximately $8 billion, rising at an annualized rate of 200 percent, driven by expanding enterprise adoption of its large language models.
The expansion carries steep costs. OpenAI projects a cash burn of approximately $27 billion in 2026, rising to about $63 billion in 2027—roughly double prior estimates. A renegotiated deal with Microsoft contributed to the higher expenditures, setting terms for OpenAI's access to Microsoft's cloud infrastructure for model training and inference.
OpenAI's business model centers on licensing its AI models and charging developers and corporations for API usage. Sustaining that model requires continuous spending on high-performance GPU clusters and research and development.
The capital requirements at the frontier of AI development limit effective competition to a handful of well-funded entities, concentrating market power. OpenAI's capital allocation decisions will determine how aggressively it pursues research versus commercial deployment—and how quickly it reaches structural profitability.
