Sam Altman insists OpenAI can sustain its rapid growth without government aid despite soaring infrastructure costs. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Last week, White House A.I. adviser David Sacks sent a sharp message to Silicon Valley: the U.S. government won’t rescue A.I. companies that overreach. “There will be no federal bailout for A.I.,” he wrote on X. The statement came in response to comments by Sarah Friar, CFO of OpenAI, who had suggested the company might need government support as it spends heavily on A.I. infrastructure. Friar later clarified that OpenAI was not seeking a government “backstop” for its infrastructure commitments.
In reaction to Sacks’s remarks—and apparently in an attempt to reassure investors and calm concerns about an AI bubble—OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the next day that the company is on a healthy path to profitability despite its large spending. OpenAI is on track to reach “$20 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025 and grow to hundreds of billions by 2030,” Altman wrote on X.
OpenAI disclosed in June that it had hit $10 billion in annual recurring revenue. Altman’s projection suggests that the company’s revenue will double in a matter of months. However, it continues to spend heavily. For all of 2024, OpenAI generated $5.5 billion in revenue, while posting a net loss of $5 billion, CNBC reported.
OpenAI’s revenue comes from three main channels:
- Consumer Subscriptions (55–60 percent): Consumer products, like paid versions of ChatGPT, account for roughly half of OpenAI’s business, according to third-party estimates based on OpenAI’s disclosures and news reports. The free tier acts as a broad funnel to drive users to the $20/month ChatGPT Plus and the $200/month ChatGPT Pro plans.
- Enterprise Solutions (25–30 percent): OpenAI products are used by millions of organizations, from startups to Fortune 500 companies. Plans range from ChatGPT Team ($25–30 per user/month) to Enterprise ($60/seat/month), with custom deployments for certain sectors, like education and health care.
- API and Developer Platform (15–20 percent): Developers embed OpenAI models into their products (for coding, automation, reasoning). Major firms such as Microsoft, Snowflake, HubSpot and Salesforce have been cited as users of the API.
While revenue is growing rapidly, so is spending. OpenAI is reportedly burning some $8 billion a year, and the rate could climb to $45 billion by 2028. The company has committed roughly $1.4 trillion over the next eight years to building data centers and inked massive GPU deals with Nvidia and AMD.
This pace inevitably raises memories of past tech bubbles, where spectacular growth masked underlying fragility. Altman himself recently warned that investor enthusiasm around A.I. has reached bubble territory, likening it to the late-1990s dot-com boom and calling some startup valuations “insane.”
Still, in his X post last week, Altman reaffirmed the company’s independent stance. “We do not have or want government guarantees for OpenAI data centers,” he said. “We believe that governments should not pick winners or losers, and that taxpayers should not bail out companies that make bad business decisions or otherwise lose in the market.”
