Basically, the AI lab told backers to expect revenues approaching $50 billion — far shorter than the explosive $70 billion number reported previously.
Though that $70 billion figure was also based on leaked investor memos, OpenAI wasn’t in any hurry to deny it, digging itself into a $20 billion hole.
So they told investors they’d make $70b and now they’re bringing down the forecast to $50b . $50b is still insane, that’s more revenue then any other software company except Microsoft (and probably anthropic), next closest is Salesforce with $41b, and Salesforce built that revenue over decades. Open AI finished 2025 with $13b in revenue, that’s nearly 4x growth in a year on more then 10 billion in revenue, that has never been done before.
Idk if this is a sign of a bubble collapsing just because it’s record setting growth and revenue aren’t as explosive as they initially said. It is still very much explosive, but more a fission bomb then an h bomb. It seems the market agrees, Nvidia is down ~1% on this news, but still up 5% on this month and 20% yoy.
So they told investors they’d make $70b and now they’re bringing down the forecast to $50b . $50b is still insane, that’s more revenue then any other software company except Microsoft (and probably anthropic), next closest is Salesforce with $41b, and Salesforce built that revenue over decades. Open AI finished 2025 with $13b in revenue, that’s nearly 4x growth in a year on more then 10 billion in revenue, that has never been done before.
Idk if this is a sign of a bubble collapsing just because it’s record setting growth and revenue aren’t as explosive as they initially said. It is still very much explosive, but more a fission bomb then an h bomb. It seems the market agrees, Nvidia is down ~1% on this news, but still up 5% on this month and 20% yoy.
50B is annualized revenue, accrued revenue will be almost certainly be quite a bit lower this year.
Tech companies love reporting ARR because it is always bigger than GAAP revenue (if the business is growing at all).
It’s not annualized in the traditional sense. They take their highest revenue day and multiply it by 365.
That… Doesn’t make sense does it? Like apart from fraud what’s the point of doing it like that?
Oh, it’s absolutely a fraud meant to deceive investors.
Just not legally speaking.
They need to pull a big number from where the sun don’t shine.
Quite a lot of that ARR is based on Ouroboros-like investment loops.