OpenAI Lost $38.5 Billion in 2025 as AI Spending Spirals Toward an IPO

A Loss Figure That Defies Easy Explanation

OpenAI's net loss attributable to the company hit $38.53 billion in 2025, according to audited documents independently verified by the Financial Times. That number is staggering on its own. But context makes it even harder to process: it's nearly eight times the $5.09 billion loss the company posted in 2024. For a company widely considered the crown jewel of the artificial intelligence boom, the scale of the financial bleeding is unlike anything the tech world has seen at this stage of a company's growth.

Total costs and expenses reached $34 billion, producing an operating loss of $20.92 billion — more than double the prior year's $8.78 billion operating shortfall. Sales and marketing expenses alone surged 418% year-over-year, jumping from $1.1 billion to $5.7 billion, while cost of revenue expanded from $2.7 billion to $7.5 billion. These aren't rounding errors. They're the costs of a company sprinting at full speed with no finish line in sight.

The Microsoft Bill and the Revenue Mirage

Despite tripling revenue to $13 billion in 2025, OpenAI spent $3.30 for every dollar it earned. Revenue growth that would make almost any other company in history look like a runaway success story is simply being outpaced by the cost of building and running frontier AI. Total costs were driven primarily by $19.18 billion in R&D and $7.5 billion in cost of revenue.

OpenAI paid Microsoft approximately $17.2 billion in 2025 across R&D, infrastructure, and other costs, while Microsoft paid OpenAI just $303 million in return. SoftBank contributed $867 million. That lopsided relationship with Microsoft — OpenAI's biggest infrastructure partner — illustrates just how dependent the company is on cloud compute it doesn't own and can't yet afford to build itself.

The Accounting Wildcard

2025 was also the year OpenAI converted from a nonprofit to a for-profit entity, leading to a $41.55 billion loss due to changes in fair value of convertible interests and warrant liability. That charge reflects fair-value adjustments tied to the conversion — an accounting treatment, not cash out the door. Strip it out, and the losses are still enormous. Include it, and the total net loss across all interests reaches $60.35 billion — a number that requires several reads before it registers.

At the end of 2025, OpenAI had just over $50 billion in assets, with almost half of that in cash — a war chest that is large, but one that is clearly being consumed at a breathtaking pace. Projected cash burn has risen to approximately $27 billion in 2026 and approximately $63 billion in 2027.

What This Means Heading Into a Potential IPO

OpenAI confidentially filed its S-1 on June 8, one week after Anthropic, while cautioning that timing is undecided and "it may be a while." The disclosure of these audited financials lands at a delicate moment. Investors weighing a public offering will now have to square a valuation in the hundreds of billions with losses that are accelerating, not shrinking. The company does not expect to reach profitability until around 2030, and internal projections suggest losses of $14 billion in 2026 alone.

The figures demonstrate the colossal capital intensity of the AI arms race, and the growth in expenses highlights that the current business model requires exponential revenue growth to achieve break-even. Deutsche Bank projects $143 billion in cumulative negative free cash flow through 2029. Whether investors treat that as a disqualifying red flag or simply the price of admission to the most consequential technology buildout in a generation will define one of the biggest financial stories of the decade.