Back to Home11/12/2025, 4:38:15 PM

How Much OpenAI Spends on Inference and Its Revenue Share with Microsoft

ani17
65 points
23 comments

Mood

heated

Sentiment

negative

Category

business

Key topics

OpenAI

AI costs

Microsoft partnership

Debate intensity80/100

The discussion revolves around a report questioning OpenAI's financials, particularly its inference costs and revenue, sparking concerns about the company's financial sustainability and potential 'cooking of the books'.

Snapshot generated from the HN discussion

Discussion Activity

Very active discussion

First comment

12m

Peak period

21

Day 1

Avg / period

11.5

Comment distribution23 data points

Based on 23 loaded comments

Key moments

  1. 01Story posted

    11/12/2025, 4:38:15 PM

    6d ago

    Step 01
  2. 02First comment

    11/12/2025, 4:50:42 PM

    12m after posting

    Step 02
  3. 03Peak activity

    21 comments in Day 1

    Hottest window of the conversation

    Step 03
  4. 04Latest activity

    11/14/2025, 4:51:32 PM

    4d ago

    Step 04

Generating AI Summary...

Analyzing up to 500 comments to identify key contributors and discussion patterns

Discussion (23 comments)
Showing 23 comments
timpera
6d ago
4 replies
Thanks for sharing! It's pretty rare to see a balanced take from Ed Zitron.

> I also cannot reconcile these numbers with the reporting that OpenAI will have a cash burn of $9 billion in CY2025. On inference alone, OpenAI has already spent $8.67 billion through Q3 CY2025.

This is insane.

ani17
6d ago
It's insane if the data is accurate. Only time will tell
gizajob
6d ago
You just have to believe. Believe in Sam Altman and everything he says and imagines. Believe in him when he says that he needs to spend 7% of world GDP on datacentres to pump out Sora slop and get his LLMs to type out the cure for cancer. Just believe. Believe harder.
B56b
6d ago
Explains why Sam was so panicked when asked about revenues recently.
rsynnott
4d ago
> It's pretty rare to see a balanced take from Ed Zitron.

How are you understanding the word 'balanced'? Do you mean _tone_, or something? Like, this is unusually dry and non-grumpy for Ed, but it's if anything more critical than his normal output.

isoprophlex
6d ago
1 reply
NVIDIA earnings call is November 19th

brb buying puts

gizajob
6d ago
1 reply
Nvidia is getting all the money though. It’s not their problem that people want to burn cash in their direction in order to build products that only lose money. At least it’s not their problem right now…
crote
6d ago
1 reply
The problem is that all the AI companies have been getting incredibly intertwined, see [0] for example. Nvidia isn't just selling chips - it is also actively investing in its own customers in order to drive up demand. This is giving us neat headlines like "NVIDIA intends to invest up to $100 billion in OpenAI as the new NVIDIA systems are deployed". The Coreweave deal is even worse: Nvidia is investing in Coreweave, so that Coreweave can buy GPUs from Nvidia, so that Nvidia can rent compute from Coreweave.

Sure, Nvidia is making crazy money right now, but what's going to happen to all those deals when the market blinks and some of those lesser players start falling over?

[0]: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-investment-is-sta...

pants2
6d ago
To some degree this is normal - for example I worked at a med device startup where we got investment from one of our manufacturing partners. That helped with growth which in turn meant more manufacturing work for them, and presumably they'd be happy to invest in another round and keep the flywheel going as long as there is some real outside demand.

I honestly think it's a great model for incentive alignment and not that sketchy on the surface. For the manufacturer, it's guaranteed revenue with upside convexity. For the startup, it's better terms and priority from the manufacturers since they have a stake in your success.

mml
6d ago
2 replies
the oldheads are snickering at dotcom 2.0 from behind their gray beards.
gizajob
6d ago
1 reply
And slowly building up their shorts and keeping cash on the sidelines to short harder when it finally all comes crashing down.
fred_is_fred
6d ago
1 reply
The problem with shorts is that bubbles can expand well beyond rationality. Cash or bonds is what I am doing.
hattmall
6d ago
1 reply
That's not a problem at all, you just roll some of your bull market gains into close dated ATM puts periodically. If the market is sideways sell calls.
qcnguy
5d ago
Genuinely curious, why do you need close dated ATM puts. If all you care about is protecting upside can't you just put in limit orders.
infamouscow
6d ago
1 reply
Bitcoin miners have also been sitting on the sidelines waiting for this too.

Compute is a hard resource, inextricably linked to money, time, and energy.

The math doesn't work in Sam's favor, no matter how much smoke he blows up your ass.

It's going to be interesting when all these GPUs are repurposed to mine Bitcoin, and people try to forget falling for the hysteria that somehow you can arrive at AGI from a glorified markov bot.

fred_is_fred
6d ago
1 reply
Is there any difference in a GPU that's good at bitcoin mining versus one that's good for AI work? Or to ask another way is all the compute being built-out now able to be repurposed for mining?
rsynnott
4d ago
> Is there any difference in a GPU that's good at bitcoin mining versus one that's good for AI work?

No GPU is good for bitcoin mining; that's all been ASICs for a long time. Even before anyone got around to making ASICs for it, FPGA-based designs had displaced GPU mining. Bitcoin mining is very, very simple.

Some altcoins use GPUs.

g-b-r
6d ago
1 reply
How can have this had so little votes and comments?
fishmicrowaver
5d ago
That is pretty interesting. Even Ed's comment section is empty. I wonder if by toning the histrionics down he just fails to engage?
lazyMonkey69
6d ago
Although not mentioned, I think the exponentially rising costs have something to do with Sora.

This along with the fact that it is easier than ever to switch models today. And the fierce competition from Google and Anthropic.

Cannot wait for the pump and dump that the OpenAI IPO is going to be.

ChrisArchitect
6d ago
Some more insights in this FT piece:

How high are OpenAI's compute costs? Possibly a lot higher than we thought

https://www.ft.com/content/fce77ba4-6231-4920-9e99-693a6c38e...

qcnguy
5d ago
Depends if these numbers are counting the free Azure credits that Microsoft invested in them.

There's a story here that's in some ways bigger than OpenAI or Anthropic's finances. Someone is leaking very sensitive and private financial information to Ed. They're clearly getting these numbers from somewhere and given the monthly breakdowns Ed posted previously for Anthropic, they are likely coming from a billing dashboard of some kind inside the big clouds. It's not very likely the leaks are coming from inside the AI labs themselves because of how cloud specific and incomplete they are.

For a big cloud to have a rogue insider like this is huge. It's really rare for big tech firms to leak private data and this report suggests MS or whoever has this problem hasn't been able to find the leaker, which is amazing. These numbers can't be that widely distributed surely? If companies like OpenAI aren't safe from leaks then nobody is.

randycupertino
5d ago
So they are basically Enron 2.0 cooking the books.

- OpenAI claims to have spent $2.5 billion on inference in H1 of 2025, report claims it actually spent $5.02 billion

- OpenAI claims to have made $3.7 billion in revenues in 2024, report claims it actually made $2.469 billion

- OpenAI claims to have made $4.3 billion in revenues in H1 of 2025, report claims it actually made $2.273 billion

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ID: 45902246Type: storyLast synced: 11/17/2025, 6:02:27 AM

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