Audited financial documents leaked as OpenAI prepares for a highly anticipated initial public offering (IPO) reveal a company experiencing explosive growth, but one whose financial gains are being heavily outpaced by the soaring costs of developing artificial intelligence (AI).
The financial statements, originally obtained by independent journalist Ed Zitron and verified by the Financial Times, show OpenAI’s reported revenue surged 253% year-over-year, climbing from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025. By the end of 2025, monthly revenues had approached $2 billion, demonstrating sustained momentum throughout the year.
Despite the top-line growth, OpenAI’s operational costs tell a more challenging story. In both 2024 and 2025, total revenues were completely eclipsed by research and development (R&D) spending alone.
Driven by immense costs of training large language models (LLMs), R&D expenses more than doubled from $7.81 billion in 2024 to a massive $19.18 billion in 2025. This includes $10.59 billion paid directly to Microsoft Corp., a primary backer.
Expenses are piling up. Cost of revenue rose to $7.5 billion from $2.65 billion, reflecting substantial infrastructure and computing costs incurred at inference time as user prompts scaled. Sales and marketing, meanwhile, expanded fivefold, from $1.11 billion to $5.73 billion, highlighting heightened competition to acquire and retain users.
Consequently, OpenAI’s day-to-day loss from operations widened from $8.78 billion in 2024 to $20.92 billion in 2025. On a percentage basis, however, operating losses showed slight structural improvement, falling from 237% of revenue to 160%.
The company’s reported net loss for 2025 ballooned to approximately $39 billion, up from $5.09 billion the previous year. However, analysts note this figure includes a major caveat: a non-recurring, non-cash accounting charge of roughly $30 billion to $41.6 billion related to the company’s transition from a non-profit to a for-profit entity.
As OpenAI’s valuation escalated, the shifting fair value of investor convertible interests and warrant liabilities created a massive internal charge on paper. Sources familiar with the matter said that after stripping away these non-cash clerical adjustments, stock-based compensation, and Microsoft computing credits, OpenAI’s actual out-of-pocket cash burn for 2025 was closer to $8 billion.
OpenAI, which has stated it aims for profitability by 2030, faces a narrowing runway. The company reportedly burned $3.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone, against $5.7 billion in revenue.
To bridge the gap, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has indicated a shift toward fiscal discipline. OpenAI recently shut down its Sora video-generation model, and corporate leadership instructed staff to eliminate “side quests” to focus strictly on enterprise and core coding users.
While OpenAI successfully raised $122 billion in March 2026 at an $852 billion valuation, maintaining investor enthusiasm ahead of its public debut will require navigating intense competition from rivals like Anthropic, pushing back against enterprise client fatigue over token pricing, and managing its multibillion-dollar data center commitments.
