OpenAI’s planned cash burn was unlike anything we’d ever seen — now they’re doubling it

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OpenAI’s planned cash burn was unlike anything we’d ever seen — now they’re doubling it-Chart R

Many of the world’s most successful tech startups burned cash for years before they got out of the red. Lighting tens of millions of dollars — or even a few billion in the most extreme cases, like Uber, Tesla, or Netflix — on fire every year became the norm as growth-obsessed disruptors invested in software, hardware, branding, and content to reach the scale required for their margins to turn positive.

But, as we noted last year, the sheer scale of OpenAI’s cash burn plans has been unlike anything we’ve ever seen. And, thanks to some great new reporting from The Information late last week, we know that the company’s cash burn forecasts are actually even more insane than previously thought.

Per the new reported figures, OpenAI expects to burn through $218 billion between 2026 and 2029, about $111 billion more than the company’s internal projections from just two quarters ago. For context, that’s 23x what Tesla burned in its cash-incinerating phase from 2007 to 2018.

In fairness to OpenAI, ChatGPT is probably still the fastest-growing stand-alone product of all time, and if the company hits its revenue goal, it certainly won’t be the cash burn of previous years that gets people talking.

Indeed, after chewing through the equivalent of the GDP of Ukraine, the company expects cash flow to turn dramatically positive in 2030 as revenue is forecast to soar to ~$280 billion, thanks to consumer ChatGPT subscriptions as well as a plethora of new revenue streams — such as API access, dedicated agentic enterprise subscriptions, advertising, and even AI-powered hardware (maybe including a smart speaker and a smart lamp).