OpenAI's annualised revenue run rate crosses $20bn in 2025

Sam Altman said OpenAI was on track to end 2025 with more than $20 billion in annualised revenue run rate, and forecast “hundreds of billions” in annual sales by 2030. The figure, given in remarks reported the same day, nearly doubled the roughly $13 billion CFO Sarah Friar had projected for 2025 only two months before, and came alongside a reminder that OpenAI had by then signed over $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments with partners including Oracle, Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom.

The claim was one data point rather than an audited result: annualised run rate takes a recent month or quarter of revenue and projects it across a year, which can move sharply with a single large enterprise deal and does not itself measure profit. Even so, it marked a sharp acceleration on OpenAI’s own recent history — from roughly $2 billion in annualised revenue in 2023 to about $6 billion in 2024, a trajectory that had already made OpenAI’s growth rate unusual among software companies of its size before Altman’s remarks pushed the projection higher still.

OpenAI remained unprofitable throughout, and separate reporting in the same period pointed to cash burn rising well beyond the roughly $9 billion the company had spent in 2024, with 2026 projections running into the tens of billions as compute and infrastructure costs scaled alongside revenue. The revenue figure, and the gap between the run-rate claim and OpenAI’s ballooning spending commitments, became a recurring reference point in a wider debate through late 2025 and into 2026 over whether frontier-lab valuations and infrastructure spending were outrunning the revenue growth meant to justify them.