After a year of hectic deals and… Rumors of an upcoming IPOOpenAI’s financial audit is intensified. Leaked documents obtained by technology blogger Ed Zitron provide more of a glimpse into OpenAI’s financials — specifically its revenue and computing costs over the past two years.
Lemon I mentioned This week, in 2024, Microsoft received $493.8 million in revenue share payments from OpenAI. In the first three quarters of 2025, this number jumped to $865.8 million, according to the documents he reviewed.
OpenAI It is said It shares 20% of its revenue with Microsoft as part of an earlier deal in which the software giant invested more than $13 billion in the powerful AI startup. (Neither the startup nor the folks at Redmond have publicly confirmed that percentage.)
However, this is where things get a little tricky, because Microsoft also shares revenue with OpenAI behind About 20% of Bing and Azure OpenAI Service revenue, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Bing is powered by OpenAI, and the OpenAI service sells cloud access to OpenAI models to developers and businesses.
The source also told TechCrunch that the leaked payments refer to Microsoft’s net revenue share, not its total revenue share. In other words, it doesn’t include what Microsoft paid to OpenAI from Bing and Azure OpenAI revenues. Microsoft deducts these numbers from its internally reported revenue share numbers, according to this person.
Microsoft doesn’t disclose how much it makes from Bing and Azure OpenAI in its financial statements, so it’s difficult to estimate how much the tech giant earns.
However, the leaked documents provide a window into the most popular company in private markets today — not just how much revenue it generates, but also how much it spends relative to those revenues.
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So, based on the widely reported 20% revenue share statistic, we can conclude that OpenAI’s revenue will be at least $2.5 billion in 2024 and $4.33 billion in the first three quarters of 2025 – but it’s very likely more than that. Previous reports of information developed OpenAI revenue for 2024 About $4 billion, and its revenues for the first half of 2025 amount to $4.3 billion.
Altman recently said that OpenAI’s revenue is “significantly more” than reported $13 billion annuallywill end the year with more than $20 billion in annual revenue run rate (which is a forecast, not guidance on actual revenue), and the company could reach $100 billion by 2027.
According to Zitron’s analysis, OpenAI may have spent approximately $3.8 billion on inference in 2024. This spending has increased to approximately $8.65 billion in the first nine months of 2025. Inference is the computing used to run an AI model trained to generate responses.
OpenAI has historically relied almost exclusively on Microsoft Azure to provide compute access, though it has also struck deals with CoreWeave, Oracle, and, more recently, AWS and Google Cloud.
Previous reports put OpenAI’s total computational spending at About $5.6 billion for 2024 And “cost of revenue” in $2.5 billion for the first half of 2025.
A source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that while OpenAI’s spending on training is mostly non-cash — meaning it’s paid for from credits Microsoft gave OpenAI as part of its investment — the company’s inference spending is largely cash. (Training refers to the computing resources needed to initially train the model.)
Although it’s not a complete picture, these numbers suggest that OpenAI could spend more on inference costs than it generates in revenue.
These implications promise to add to the incessant chatter about artificial intelligence that has seeped into every conversation from New York City to Silicon Valley. If modeling giant OpenAI is still in the red running its models, what might this mean for huge investments in staggering valuations for the rest of the AI world?
OpenAI declined to comment. Microsoft did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
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