OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar says the company's compute grew from 0.2 GW in 2023 to ~1.9 GW in 2025 and its annualized revenue grew from $2B in 2023 to $20B+ in 2025
We launched ChatGPT as a research preview to understand what would happen if we put frontier intelligence directly in people's hands.
OpenAISarah Friar
Context & Ripple Effects
OpenAI's reported scale-up follows an earlier climb from $1.6B in annualized revenue in late 2023 and a 2024 forecast that put 2025 revenue at $11.6B. The new figures indicate that monetization and capacity expansion advanced together rather than as separate efforts.
The company had also said paid ChatGPT subscriptions rose sharply in 2024 while API usage increased seven-fold as subscriptions and API demand accelerated. That makes the compute increase material: it is the operating base for serving a larger consumer and developer business.
First-order effects
OpenAI now has a public scale benchmark—about 1.9 GW of compute and more than $20B in annualized revenue for 2025—strengthening the connection between its infrastructure commitments and commercial demand.
Customers and partners gain evidence that ChatGPT and API growth are being supported by substantially larger capacity, while OpenAI must keep converting that capacity into durable revenue.
Second-order effects
Rival model providers face a clearer competitive reference point: consumer subscriptions and API demand can support infrastructure expansion at far larger scale than OpenAI's earlier reported base.
Infrastructure suppliers and financing partners gain a more concrete demand signal, but the pace of future build-outs will remain tied to whether revenue growth continues to absorb the added compute.
Third-order effects
The figures reinforce a compute-to-revenue flywheel in which frontier-model companies increasingly operate as both software providers and large infrastructure buyers.
If this pattern persists, access to long-duration power and compute capacity may become a more important determinant of AI-platform competition than model releases alone.
The trend: Frontier AI is shifting from an application-led market toward a capital-intensive platform business where revenue growth and compute deployment must scale in tandem.
openai now hitting ~$20b annualized revenue basically validates their early 3x every year claim. that part aged well & it is impressive but not shocking. they project ~$100b in ~3 years, which implies ~2x yoy from here. that's a very different slope esp for a household name [imag…
🚨 OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar just posted a huge update on revenue: $20B+ ARR. The article went onto say: “Compute grew ~3x year over year (0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in 2024, ~1.9 GW in 2025). Revenue followed the same curve: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025.” If ARR [imag…
OpenAI's CFO just published the most important chart in AI. Compute: 0.2 → 0.6 → 1.9 GW (3x/year) Revenue: $2B → $6B → $20B (3x/year) “More compute would have led to faster monetization.” While SaaS multiples have collapsed from 50x to 10-15x, OpenAI is raising at 65x [image]
Holy hell. OpenAI going from $2B → $6B → $20B+ ARR in basically two years, while compute scales ~3x YoY. That's not hype. That's real, paid demand hammering real infrastructure. Bubbles don't compound like this at this scale. The “AI is a hoax” crowd is officially out of [image]
obviously this didn't factor ads. let's talk about ads cuz ads inside chatgpt will be insane (i have posted about this on my substack). meta made ~$58 per user in 2025 purely from ads. now imagine openai hits ~1b free users in 2026 (800m weekly right now, so this is
From the OpenAI post: 'Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025. While revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025. This is never-before-seen growth at such scale. And we firmly believe that more compute in these periods [im…
OpenAI's CFO shared that over the past three years, its revenue has directly tracked available compute. This was exactly my thesis earlier, back when the AI bubble narrative was at its peak when Sam Altman refused to answer the $1.4T question. Compute grew 3× year over year, or […
OpenAI CFO shared new financials for the startup and revenue is almost directly correlated to compute. Revenue for 2025 hit $20B+, a 3x increase from 2024 ($6B) and 10x since 2023 ($2B). Compute at end 2025 was 1.9GW, a 3x increase from 2024 (0.6GW) and 9.5x since 2023 (0.2GW). […
Hi everyone who says AI compute is getting cheaper. OpenAI has made about $1.20 per kWh of compute each year for the last 3 years. Zero cost reduction in 3 years. Conveniently, takes about 1 kW to run an H100, so they make $1.20 per GPU hour. Reserved instances run anywhere
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar just published OpenAI Strategy and Growing Metrics. Compute rose from 0.2GW in 2023 to 0.6GW in 2024 to ~1.9GW in 2025, about 3x each year. Annual recurring revenue (ARR), rose in step from $2B to $6B to $20B+, about 10x in 2 years. The earlier [image]
“Revenue followed the same curve growing 3X year over year, or 10X from 2023 to 2025: $2B ARR in 2023, $6B in 2024, and $20B+ in 2025.” This is never-before-seen growth at such scale. 🤯🤯🤯 https://openai.com/...
“Compute is the scarcest resource in AI.” Revenue mapping to compute checks out with lots of vendors we talk to. Good to see it publicized. https://openai.com/... [image]
New numbers and comments from @OpenAI CFO: “Compute is the scarcest resource in AI.” “Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs.” “Compute grew 3X year over year or 9.5X from 2023 to 2025: 0.2 GW in 2023, 0.6 GW in [i…
Coherent attempt to be B to C goes to B to B. I like its challenge to Google and Anthropic. Need Musk suit to go away to see $750B ...imho https://openai.com/...
https://openai.com/... “Both our Weekly Active User (WAU) and Daily Active User (DAU) figures continue to produce all-time highs. This growth is driven by a flywheel across compute, frontier research, products, and monetization. Investment in compute powers leading-edge [image]
A reminder that ‘annualized’ revenue means taking the best month out of the year, and multiplying that by 12. It is always going to be a higher number than ‘annual’ revenue. That @OpenAI felt it needed to talk annualized tells us how much pressure it's under to _show_ growth.
OpenAI shared this chart to show that AI revenue is scaling almost one-for-one with compute. Going from ~0.2 GW to ~1.9 GW (~10x increase in power) maps to revenue growing from ~$2B to ~$20B which implies OpenAI is generating ~$10.5B of revenue per GW. The really important [image…