Overview
- An internal presentation reviewed by the Financial Times projects negative free cash flow of $278 billion from 2026 through 2030 and about $856 billion in compute and infrastructure costs over the same period.
- OpenAI expects revenue to grow sharply from roughly $36 billion this year to $350 billion in 2030, with cumulative revenue of about $840 billion through the decade.
- The company raised about $122 billion in March but the plan shows that capital could be exhausted by 2028 if spending continues, prompting OpenAI to delay a planned IPO and enter early talks for another large funding round at valuations near $1.2 trillion.
- Rising costs are driven by large training and inference workloads for state-of-the-art models and by price cuts to stay competitive with rivals such as Anthropic and lower-cost open-weight models, which together squeeze margins.
- Major suppliers including Nvidia, Oracle and SoftBank-backed data‑centre firms have tied capacity deals to OpenAI’s demand, so the firm’s need for new capital will directly affect those partners and the wider AI infrastructure market.