OpenAI Burned An Estimated $19 Billion In Cash Between 2023 and 1H 2025 - Where Did It Go?
OpenAI had $9.6 billion in cash at the end of June.
So, Microsoftâs funding in 2023 was $2 billion in cash (and $8 billion in credits, but Iâm not counting those), add in the $6.6 billion of cash from 2024 (iâm not including the line of credit, as that would be a âcash equivalent), $10 billion from SoftBank and other investors in June 2025, and we assume $2 billion in revenue in 2023, $3.7 billion in revenue in 2024, and $4.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2025 (for a total of $28.6 billion in cash), this means that OpenAI burned $19 billion in cash from the beginning of 2023 through the end of June 2025.
Yet the reported losses are much, much smaller.
For the sake of argument, Iâm also going to leave OpenAIâs $4 billion line of credit out of the calculation.
In 2024, OpenAI allegedly burned $5 billion. Through 1H 2025, it had a ânet lossâ of $13.5 billion but an âoperating lossâ of $6.7 billion, and the painfully-worded accounting leaked to The Information is done in such a way as to make it unclear how much of that is cash, with the hopes that you believe itâs not cash burn.
$19 billion in burned cash doesnât make sense based on any reported numbers.
Even if we assume OpenAI burned $2 billion in cash in 2023, $5 billion in cash in 2024 and $6.7 billion in cash in 1H 2025, thatâs $14.9 billion in missing burn to get us to the $28.6 billion total.
I guess there could be prepayments as part of its deals with Broadcom or CoreWeave, but even then, The Information had another tidbit:
OpenAI also recorded around $670 million of equity it gave to unnamed entities for providing the company with servers in the first half of 2025, compared to $1 billion in such equity compensation last year. While itâs not clear which cloud provider or providers received the equity, the decision could help OpenAI minimize its cash burn as it projected it would spend $16 billion to renâŠ
Tomorrow's Premium: Based on analysis of years of reporting, OpenAI has burned $23 billion since 2023, ending 1H 2025 with $9.6bn cash. OpenAI appears to have $9bn+ more in burn than has previously been reported.
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