OpenAI spending hit $34bn last year ahead of planned IPO (www.ft.com)

submitted 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) by misk@piefed.social to c/technology@piefed.social

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https://removepaywalls.com/https://www.ft.com/content/e15b0d7e-ff6b-4f16-ba7a-4068feddb828

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[-] misk@piefed.social 3 points 4 days ago

This is with all the free compute they’re getting from Microsoft, who are MUCH deeper in the hole on their LLM business profitability.

[-] eestileib 3 points 4 days ago

Even then they're still pumping money to MSFT

In the 2025 calendar year, OpenAI paid Microsoft $10.59 billion for “Research and development” expenses. We believe this most likely refers to the cost of training OpenAI’s models.

The documents also mention a $6.047 billion charge related to “cost of revenue,” a $527 million charge for sales and marketing, and $42 million in “general and administrative expenses.” In total, OpenAI’s expenses to Microsoft amounted to $17.2 billion.

I'm starting to think this is not all on the up and up.

[-] deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 1 points 4 days ago

"cost of revenue" sounds like "cost of goods sold" in a business with tangible products. Rather. It cost $6 of cloud to sell that $34 service

R&D can probably be amortized over the lifetime of the product, in this case the model's useful sellable lifetime. But a chunk of that is renting compute from MS and the bill's due.

Doesn't sound any more fishy than any other business throwing $b around.

this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2026

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