OpenAI's finances are under the spotlight after audited documents revealing the company's 2025 spending were leaked ahead of an expected initial public offering.
According to reporter Ed Zitron, who says he viewed audited financial documents, OpenAI spent $34 billion in 2025 — a 172% increase year-over-year. Of that total, $19 billion went to research and development, and nearly $6 billion was directed toward sales and marketing.
Despite generating significant revenue, the company recorded a net loss of $38.5 billion, according to reporting by qz.com. The scale of the losses underscores just how expensive it is to compete at the frontier of artificial intelligence, where training cutting-edge models requires enormous compute infrastructure and the engineers to build it.
The spending figures come as OpenAI is widely expected to pursue a public offering, making the financial details especially consequential for prospective investors trying to gauge whether the company can ever turn a profit. Finimize noted that the spending spree itself puts OpenAI's IPO ambitions on full display — the costs reflect a company racing to establish dominance before going public, not one managing for profitability.
The environmental dimension of that spending has also drawn attention. Yahoo flagged that $34 billion in AI infrastructure outlays carries significant environmental costs, given the energy demands of the data centers powering OpenAI's models.
For everyday readers, the bottom line is this: the company behind ChatGPT is spending at a pace that would bankrupt most businesses, betting that scale and dominance today will translate into profits tomorrow — and it wants public investors to fund that bet.