FT puts OpenAI’s cash burn at almost $280B through 2030

OpenAI projects that it will burn through almost $280 billion in cash by the end of 2030, the Financial Times reported on September 18. Reuters carried the report and said it could not immediately verify it.

Reporting on OpenAI’s 2025 books put last year’s loss at $38.5 billion on $13.07 billion of revenue. Operations accounted for $20.92 billion of that loss. The rest came from fair value changes on convertible interests and a warrant liability during the company’s conversion from a nonprofit into a for-profit entity.

The burn forecast has gone up with each revision. The Decoder reported that one revision raised expected cumulative burn through 2029 by about $80 billion, to $115 billion, and a later one added roughly $111 billion more through 2030. The 2028 figure alone went from about $11 billion of burn in the Q1 2025 projection to $47 billion in Q3 2025 and $85 billion in Q1 2026. Anthropic, the same outlet said, is aiming to break even as early as 2028.

Inference, the cost of running models for users, is a major part of the increase. That bill quadrupled in 2025 because demand for ChatGPT and the API outran expectations and OpenAI had to buy more expensive compute on short notice. Adjusted gross margin fell to 33 percent in 2025, down from 40 percent the year before. In those earlier projections OpenAI did not expect positive cash flow before 2030, when it forecast $39 billion. Burn was put at $25 billion for 2026 and $57 billion for 2027.

OpenAI closed a $122 billion funding round by March at an $852 billion post-money valuation. The next large source of money would be a listing, and Sam Altman has pushed that out. “Right now would be an ill-advised moment to go public,” he told Fortune on September 11, which rules out an IPO this year.