OpenAI is printing money right now. The company is pulling in roughly $13 billion in annual revenue, with 70% coming from everyday people paying $20 a month to chat with an AI, according to the Financial Times. That’s pretty wild when you consider ChatGPT has 800 million regular users, but only 5% are actually paying subscribers.
Raking in billions though it may be, OpenAI has also committed to spending over $1 trillion over the next decade (yes, trillion). The company has recently locked in deals for more than 26 gigawatts of computing capacity from Oracle, Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom — infrastructure that’ll cost vastly more than what’s coming in.
To bridge this gap, OpenAI is getting creative, reports the FT. A five-year plan includes exploring government contracts, shopping tools, video services, consumer hardware, and even becoming a computing supplier itself through its Stargate data center project.
A growing number of businesses need the math to work out. Some of America’s most valuable companies are now leaning on OpenAI to fulfill major contracts, notes the FT; if OpenAI falters (no pressure!), it could potentially destabilize the broader U.S. market.
