Yo, y’all, grab a seat because the latest OpenAI receipts are out… and damn, they’re hot.
Here’s the gist:
Leaks from tech blogger Ed Zitron give us a peek into how much OpenAI is actually paying Microsoft — and it’s wild.
In 2024, Microsoft pocketed $493.8 million from OpenAI. Not bad, right?
But hold your hats: in just the first three quarters of 2025, that number jumped to $865.8 million. Yeah… almost doubled.
Why? Well, OpenAI reportedly gives Microsoft 20% of its revenue because of that $13B+ investment deal.
But here’s the plot twist: Microsoft also shares revenue back with OpenAI from Bing and Azure OpenAI services. Basically, they’re swapping money back and forth like some giant, billion-dollar “pay-it-forward” game. The only thing is… the leaked docs show Microsoft’s net cut, so the full picture? Still a mystery.
Now, let’s talk compute, the real money pit.
OpenAI leans on Azure, but also dabbles with CoreWeave, Oracle, AWS, and Google Cloud. So compute spend in 2024? Around $5.6 billion. But the cost of revenue for the first half of 2025? $2.5 billion.
Training is mostly covered with Microsoft credits, basically free GPU rides thanks to Big M. But inference, the day-to-day cost of actually running the models for you, me, and every dev building a chatbot?
That’s cash out of pocket. And from what we can tell, there’s a real possibility OpenAI is burning more money running its models than its bringing in.
So yeah… the AI hype train might have a tiny, really expensive engine under the hood.
If OpenAI — the crown jewel of AI startups — is still deep in the red, it raises big questions about all these other sky-high valuations in the AI world.
And as usual, both OpenAI and Microsoft are keeping mum. No comment, no reply, nothing.
Big picture takeaway?
We’re watching a company burn through compute like it’s popcorn, juggle revenue-share math that would make an accountant cry, and still somehow stand at the center of the biggest tech boom in a decade.
If this is the financial reality behind the curtain… the next 12 months are gonna be very interesting.
Stay tuned — because this story is far from over.
