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Based on analysis of years of revenues, losses and funding, since 2023, OpenAI has taken in $28.6bn in cash and had $13.7bn in losses. However, reports say OpenAI ended 1H 2025 with $9.6bn in cash - suggesting OpenAI's losses are billions higher than reported. www.wheresyoured.at/where-is-ope...

wheresyoured.atWhere Is OpenAI's Money Going?Soundtrack: Queens of the Stone Age - Song For The Dead Editor's Note: The original piece had a mathematical error around burnrate, it's been fixed. A few days ago, Sam Altman said that OpenAI’s rev...

My theory is that OpenAI's inference costs are much higher than expected. Every new GPU is marketed for inference, Stargate Abilene is full of inference-focused Blackwell GPUs, and OpenAI's latest releases have all been very, very inference intensive. www.wheresyoured.at/where-is-ope...

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Stargate Abilene being full of inference-focused GPUs tells you something OpenAI won't say out loud: the models are too expensive to run. the business model requires inference costs to drop faster than usage grows. that's a bet, not a plan

A simplified version. You *train* a model to do something. Example, differentiate dogs from cats in photos. This might take 1000s of photos. You then use a model on a new photo. “Is it a cat or dog in this photo?” That is “making an inference.” Inferences are claimed cheaper than training. 1/3

This is the DVD model. It is cheaper to playback a DVD (compute-wise) than record it. Good, because you record once and play many times. If LLMs train expensively but do inference cheaply, LLM firms can say, “We did the expensive part already, now on to the cheap (profitable) stuff.” 2/3

Of course, a lot depends on 1. How much cheaper is inference than training? 2. What is number of inference tasks you must run? Since OpenAI is very hand-wavey, you won’t get a spreadsheet from them. Hope this helps. 3/3

I thought I read somewhere that IF they were to IPO they only expected to net $100B cash from it at a $1T valuation. I could be misremembering, but if that's the case I can see why they've deprioritized going public. It would be woefully insufficient in terms of raising capital.

As a note: that $4.1 billion in missing cash isn't covered by data centers or acquisitions, either. Oracle/Crusoe building Stargate, Microsoft builds the rest of the capacity (or CoreWeave does), and all acquisitions have been in stock. Very strange stuff. bsky.app/profile/edzi...

Ed Zitron@edzitron.com

I cover this in the piece! OpenAI doesn't have capex - everybody else is paying for the land, the data centers, the GPUs, etc. OpenAI doesn't have assets other than real estate. They even buy other companies in stock.