ChatGPT Earned $13 Billion, So Why Did It Post a $38.5 Billion Loss?

Imagine this: You wake up in the morning, turn on your smartphone, and ask AI, “Please summarize the materials for today’s important meeting.” ChatGPT delivers a perfect answer in just seconds, and we comfortably use this magical technology for a subscription fee of barely $20 a month, or almost for free. However, while we marvel at and enjoy this convenience, behind the scenes, astronomical amounts of money are literally burning fiercely like a wildfire.

Recently, a massive leak occurred that shook the tech and financial industries. According to audited financial data obtained by prominent tech blogger Ed Zitron and cross-verified by the Financial Times, OpenAI recorded a staggering net loss of $38.5 billion in the single year of 2025 OpenAI spending hits $34 billion in 2025: Ed Zitron.

Of course, driven by ChatGPT’s massive global popularity, the company also generated a record-breaking $13 billion in revenue OpenAI’s financials leaked: $21 billion in losses against $13 …. However, its expenditures were nearly three times greater than the money it earned, ultimately resulting in a tremendous amount of cash vanishing into thin air. Just what exactly is happening inside the vault of the world’s smartest AI company?

Why Does This Matter?

This news is not merely gossip about a “successful Silicon Valley company losing some money.” It is a significant event where the “hidden bill” for the cutting-edge AI technology we use daily and take for granted has finally been laid bare to the world.

Let’s put these numbers into a more relatable perspective. OpenAI’s 2025 deficit of $38.5 billion is a colossal sum—equivalent to over 50 trillion Korean won. This amount rivals the annual budget of a moderately sized country or is enough money to build several massive, state-of-the-art space stations connecting the globe. What is even more surprising is that just a year earlier, in 2024, the deficit was around $5 billion (approximately $5.09 billion). In just a single year, the deficit widened exponentially OpenAI Is Growing Fast. Its Losses Are Growing Faster - Gizmodo. This means that the company’s cash burn rate is accelerating much faster than its growth and revenue increases.

Experts point out that this figure clearly illustrates a “structural challenge” facing the entire AI industry, rather than an issue of reckless management by a single company OpenAI spending hits $34 billion in 2025: Ed Zitron. Put simply, the enormous expense of building and running cutting-edge AI systems smarter than humans simply cannot be sustained by current revenue structures like the “$20 a month subscription model” Leaked OpenAI Financials Reveal A Stunning $38.5 Billion Loss - Benzinga. If this continues, companies may eventually be forced to drastically raise service prices or lower the quality of the free services we currently enjoy in order to cover these massive costs.

Understanding It Simply: A Super-Genius Chef and Golden Firewood

So, where exactly are they spending money like water? To understand this clearly, let’s imagine hiring the world’s smartest “genius chef” (AI) for a restaurant.

The first massive expense goes into “recipe research and kitchen construction (R&D).” To create a perfect, unprecedented, and ingenious flavor, they must hire numerous genius researchers and develop secret recipes through endless trial and error. This process is the research and development (R&D) phase that increases the artificial intelligence’s capabilities. According to the leaked data, out of the $34 billion in major expenditures OpenAI made in 2025, well over half—about $19 billion—was poured exclusively into R&D OpenAI’s Spending Reportedly Hit $34 Billion in 2025 as AI …. This includes the labor costs to bring in top talent and the massive supercomputer costs required to train the models. On top of this, the cost of sales and marketing to promote the finished dish to the public amounted to about $6 billion.

However, the second expense is far more terrifying and fatal. This is the “gas bill incurred every time a dish is cooked (Inference).” Perfecting the recipe isn’t the end. Even when a customer makes a simple order like, “Please fry me an egg,” this genius chef cannot use an ordinary gas stove; they can only start cooking by burning thousands of dollars’ worth of “premium golden firewood” just to light the kitchen fire.

In AI technology, this is called “Inference” (the computational process where AI analyzes a user’s question based on pre-learned knowledge and instantly generates an answer in real-time). Every time we ask ChatGPT a casual question, massive supercomputer centers working invisibly behind the scenes furiously spin up, recklessly consuming enormous amounts of power and computing resources. According to the leaked documents, during the first three quarters of 2025 alone, a staggering $8.65 billion vanished into thin air simply as inference costs (computing costs) to generate these answers Leaked Documents Reveal OpenAI’s Massive Compute Costs May …. In other words, as AI gets smarter, the computing infrastructure costs required to produce a single answer skyrocket astronomically.

To use an analogy, an AI service is absolutely not structured like standard smartphone apps such as WhatsApp or YouTube, where “once built, tens of millions can use it without significant additional costs.” It is a dizzying situation where every time a user logs into the system and asks a question, chunks of cash for “firewood” are siphoned out of the company’s bank account in real-time.

Current Situation: A Partnership Intertwined Like a Giant Spiderweb

To handle such breathtakingly massive computing resources, OpenAI is connected to the tech giant Microsoft through very deep financial ties. While the tight-knit partnership between the two companies has been well-known in the industry, these leaked documents reveal in granular detail, for the first time, exactly how much money is changing hands.

OpenAI paid Microsoft $494 million throughout 2024 to use and maintain system infrastructure, and handed over a massive sum of $866 million—nearly double the previous amount—in the first three quarters of 2025 alone Leaked files expose OpenAI’s huge payments to Microsoft. As the infrastructure costs to run AI models grow large enough to overwhelm revenue Leaked files expose OpenAI’s huge payments to Microsoft, the more mainstream popularity ChatGPT gains, the more the massive “rent” that must be paid to Microsoft, which controls the cloud server network, inflates as well. To borrow the chef analogy again, it is like the dilemma of opening a mega-restaurant where the rent paid to the landlord rises exponentially as more customers flock in.

What embarrassed OpenAI executives even more was that this stunning $38.5 billion deficit report card was leaked to the outside world through “confidential IPO (Initial Public Offering) documents” they were quietly preparing to secure large-scale investments Leaked OpenAI financials reveal a stunning $38.5 billion loss. Right before an ambitious plan to officially list the company on the stock market to gather massive investment funds from the general public and institutions, the bottom of the company’s empty vault was laid completely bare for the whole world to see.

What Happens Next?

This colossal deficit report card casts a very dark shadow over OpenAI’s stock listing (IPO) plans. No matter how outstanding the technology is, investors will inevitably ask, “Can this company make money?” Currently, financial prediction markets pessimistically view OpenAI’s chances of successfully going public by December 31, 2026, at a level of 45.5%, falling short of even half OpenAI 2025 financials leaked: $39B loss ahead of IPO. This is because, in order to receive public investment, the company must prove with numbers its clear “financial sustainability”—that it can eventually turn a profit despite enduring this massive deficit Leaked Documents Reveal OpenAI’s Massive Compute Costs May ….

Starting with this incident, the entire AI industry will face a critical crossroads going forward. It is an undeniable fact that AI possesses immense potential to cure diseases, increase work efficiency, and dramatically change our lives. However, a monumental homework assignment remains: exactly how, and from whose pockets, will the tens of billions of dollars poured into the furnace every day to maintain that magical intelligence be covered?

Perhaps in the not-too-distant future, instead of the nearly unlimited AI we currently use for the price of a few cups of coffee, we might face a much more segmented and expensive “premium AI subscription service” based on the quality or speed of answers. After all, there is no such thing as free magic in the world. Finding a realistic revenue model that can financially back this innovation has become the most urgent survival task for OpenAI and the tech industry, just as much as keeping up with the speed of technological innovation itself.

MindTickleBytes AI’s View

The massive $38.5 billion deficit recorded by OpenAI may not merely be a sign of one company’s management failure, but rather the most expensive “ticket” paid while sprinting to open an “era of hyper-intelligence” that humanity has never explored. Historically, massive innovations that changed the world have always demanded unimaginably high initial costs. However, whether the final bill for this staggering ticket will ultimately be directed at us, the consumers using the service, or whether it can be absorbed through the creation of an entirely new industrial ecosystem, is a question we must carefully monitor. Right now, we stand in the middle of a grand experiment testing not only the boundaries of technology but also the limits of capital.

References

1. OpenAI spending hits $34 billion in 2025: Ed Zitron
2. OpenAI’s financials leaked: $21 billion in losses against $13 …
3. OpenAI Is Growing Fast. Its Losses Are Growing Faster - Gizmodo
4. Leaked OpenAI Financials Reveal A Stunning $38.5 Billion Loss - Benzinga
5. OpenAI’s Spending Reportedly Hit $34 Billion in 2025 as AI …
6. Leaked Documents Reveal OpenAI’s Massive Compute Costs May …
7. Leaked files expose OpenAI’s huge payments to Microsoft
8. Leaked OpenAI financials reveal a stunning $38.5 billion loss
9. OpenAI 2025 financials leaked: $39B loss ahead of IPO