OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, burned through staggering sums of money in 2025. According to reports cited by MSN, the firm lost roughly $38.5 billion last year alone — a figure higher than the annual revenue of Indian IT giants TCS or Infosys.
The scale of the spending has earned the company a stark nickname. Chinese outlet 36 Kr describes OpenAI as a "money-burning machine" that keeps running, putting the figure even higher at around $260 billion lost over the year.
The discrepancy between these numbers points to a deeper problem: nobody outside the company has a clear picture of its finances. Fortune calls OpenAI's balance sheet "the most mysterious — and consequential — in business." For a firm at the center of the global AI boom, that opacity is unusual and significant.
Losses on this scale are not necessarily unexpected for a company racing to build cutting-edge AI, which requires enormous spending on computing power, chips, and talent. But the sheer size of the numbers — and the uncertainty around exactly what they are — raises questions about how sustainable the spending is and how OpenAI will eventually turn its technology into profit.
Why it matters: OpenAI sits at the heart of the AI industry, so the health of its finances — and the mystery surrounding them — affects investors, competitors, and the broader economy betting heavily on artificial intelligence.