OpenAI’s leaked financial data showed billions of dollars in computing spending and skyrocketing revenues

After a year of active deals and rumors of OpenAI’s imminent IPO, financial scrutiny on the company has intensified. Technoblogger Ed Zitron has published ducked documents that provide a more detailed look at OpenAI’s revenue and compute spending in recent years.

After a year of intense dealmaking and rumors of an imminent IPO, OpenAI is now under scrutiny.

According to the data, Microsoft received $493.8 million in revenue sharing from OpenAI in 2024. For the first three quarters of 2025, that amount rose to $865.8 million.

OpenAI is reportedly giving Microsoft about 20% of revenue — part of an agreement under which the tech giant invested more than $13 billion in the startup.

At the same time, Microsoft is also giving OpenAI about 20% of revenue from Bing and OpenAI’s Azure service, as the search engine runs on OpenAI models and the enterprise service provides cloud access to those models.

A source familiar with the situation told TechCrunch that the leaked amounts show the net share of revenue passed through to Microsoft, minus OpenAI’s payments to Bing and Azure OpenAI. Microsoft doesn’t disclose revenue from those businesses, so it’s difficult to estimate the amount.

The documents do, however, provide unique insight into how fast OpenAI is growing and how its revenues compare to its expenses. Based on the 20% share mentioned, OpenAI’s total revenue was at least $2.5 billion in 2024 and $4.33 billion in the first three quarters of 2025. However, the actual numbers are probably higher. The Information previously reported roughly $4 billion in revenue in 2024 and $4.3 billion — for the first six months of 2025.

The Information previously reported about $4 billion in revenue in 2024 and $4.3 billion — for the first half of 2025.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that actual revenues are «significantly higher» than the oft-quoted $13 billion a year and that the company will hit an annualized target of more than $20 billion by year’s end. What’s more, he said, OpenAI could potentially reach $100 billion in revenue by 2027.

He said that OpenAI could potentially reach $100 billion in revenue by 2027.

According to Zitron’s analysis, in 2024, OpenAI spent about $3.8 billion on inference — the computations required to run a trained model. In the first nine months of 2025, that spending increased to about $8.65 billion, and the company has historically relied almost entirely on the computing power of Microsoft Azure, though it has also utilized resources from CoreWeave, Oracle, and recently entered into agreements with AWS and Google Cloud.

It was previously reported that OpenAI’s total compute spend in 2024 was about $5.6 billion, and «revenue value» for the first half of 2025 — $2.5 billion.

All of this data suggests that OpenAI may be spending more on inferencing than it actually earns. This cost-to-income ratio only fuels talk of a «bubble» around artificial intelligence. If the largest modeling company is still operating at a disadvantage when it launches its models, what might that mean for the rest of the players attracting investment at record valuations?”

What does that mean for the other players attracting investment at record valuations?

OpenAI declined to comment. Microsoft also did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.