Leaked financial docs show OpenAI is losing billions of dollars a year
Audited accounting shows growing revenues being dwarfed by R&D, other expenses.
Audited accounting shows growing revenues being dwarfed by R&D, other expenses. The audited financial statements, obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron , show OpenAI’s reported revenue growing from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025.
The short version
- The Financial Times, which reviewed the same documents , writes that the company’s monthly revenues had grown to nearly $2 billion by the end of 2025, suggesting that its ongoing revenue rates continued to grow throughout the year.
- R&D expenses alone still easily outpace OpenAI’s quickly growing revenues.
- OpenAI’s total revenues in both of the last two years were outpaced by research and development alone, which grew from a $7.81 billion line item in 2024 to a massive $19.18 billion cost in 2025.
- Those numbers seem to reflect the significant costs OpenAI incurred in training new models and include $10.59 billion in R&D costs paid to Microsoft alone in 2025.
What the source reports
On top of that, OpenAI’s “cost of revenue” (i.e., the money spent producing and distributing the product) increased from $2.65 billion in 2024 to $7.5 billion in 2025. This cost line likely reflects the significant compute costs incurred at “inference time” as the company’s models respond to a growing number of user prompts. Costs associated with sales and marketing also grew from $1.11 billion in 2024 to $5.73 billion in 2025.
Why it matters
OpenAI’s operating loss is shrinking as a percentage of revenue, but there’s a long way to go before it becomes a profit.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica — AI via the links above and below.