OpenAI audit reveals $34B spent, $13B revenue, and $38.5B net loss in 2025

Audited documents from OpenAI 2025 fiscal year, reviewed by Ed Zitron Where Your Ed At newsletter and independently verified by the Financial Times, reveal financial numbers that paint a more complex picture than the company public narrative suggests.

The numbers

• Total spending: ~$34 billion
• Revenue: ~$13 billion
• Net loss: $38.53 billion (roughly 7.5x the $5.09B loss in 2024)

Expense breakdown:

• R&D: approximately $19 billion
• Sales and marketing: nearly $6 billion
• Inference on Microsoft Azure: $5.02 billion in H1 2025 alone

Caveat: the loss has an asterisk

The $38.53 billion figure includes a one-time non-cash charge of $41.55 billion related to OpenAI conversion from nonprofit to for-profit public benefit corporation (PBC) in 2025. This accounting revaluation artificially inflated the loss.

However, even stripping out that one-time charge, core operating costs are growing faster than revenue — each new model requires more compute to train and to serve.

The revenue is real

OpenAI generated $13.07 billion in 2025, with monthly revenue reaching approximately $2 billion by year-end (up from $1 billion per quarter at end of 2024). The company ended the year with ~$50 billion in assets, nearly half in cash, supported by the $122 billion funding round closed in early 2026.

The S-1 challenge

This is the financial profile OpenAI S-1 will need to explain to public investors: extraordinary revenue growth alongside losses that, net of the one-time charge, still make profitability dependent on assumptions about AI agent monetization that have not yet been demonstrated at scale.