After a year of frenetic agreements and rumors of an upcoming IPOFinancial scrutiny over OpenAI is intensifying. The leaked documents obtained by technology blogger Ed Zitron provide more information about OpenAI’s finances, specifically its revenue and computing costs over the past few years.
Zitron reported This week that in 2024, Microsoft will receive $493.8 million in revenue sharing payments from OpenAI. In the first three quarters of 2025, that figure jumped to $865.8 million, according to documents he saw.
Open AI reported It shares 20% of its revenue with Microsoft as part of a previous deal in which the software giant invested more than $13 billion in the powerful AI startup. (Neither the startup nor the people at Redmond have publicly confirmed this percentage.)
However, this is where things get a little complicated, because Microsoft also shares revenue with OpenAI, kicking back About 20% of revenue from Bing and Azure OpenAI Service, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Bing is powered by OpenAI, and the OpenAI service sells cloud access to OpenAI models to developers and businesses.
The source also told TechCrunch that the leaked payments refer to Microsoft’s net revenue share, not gross revenue share. In other words, they don’t include what Microsoft paid OpenAI for Bing and Azure OpenAI royalties. Microsoft deducts those figures from its internally reported revenue share figures, according to this person.
Microsoft doesn’t break out how much it makes from Bing and Azure OpenAI in its financial statements, so it’s difficult to estimate how much the tech giant is giving back.
However, the leaked documents offer a window into the most popular company in the private markets today, and not only how much it earns in revenue, but also how much it spends compared to that revenue.
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So based on that widely reported 20% revenue share statistic, we can infer that OpenAI’s revenue was at least $2.5 billion in 2024 and $4.33 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, but it’s very likely more. Previous reports from The Information Well OpenAI revenue in 2024 at around $4 billion, and its first half 2025 revenue at 4.3 billion dollars.
Altman also recently said that OpenAI’s revenue is “much more” than reported by 13 billion dollars a yearwill end last year $20 Billion Annualized Revenue Run Rate (which is a projection, not a guide to actual revenue), and that the company could even reach $100 billion by 2027.
According to Zitron analysis, OpenAI may have spent approximately $3.8 billion on inference in 2024. That spending increased to approximately $8.65 billion in the first nine months of 2025. Inference is the computation used to run an AI model trained to generate responses.
Historically, OpenAI has relied almost exclusively on Microsoft Azure to provide compute access, although it has also struck deals with CoreWeave and Oracle, and more recently AWS and Google Cloud.
Previous reports put OpenAI’s total compute spend at approximately $5.6 billion by 2024 and its “cost of revenue” in 2.5 billion dollars by the first half of 2025.
A source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that while OpenAI’s training spend is non-cash (i.e., it is paid for with credits Microsoft granted OpenAI as part of its investment), the company’s inference spend is largely cash. (Training refers to the computing resources required to initially train a model.)
While not a complete picture, these figures imply that OpenAI could be spending more on inference costs than it earns in revenue.
And those implications promise to add to the incessant chatter about the AI bubble that has been seen in every conversation from New York City to Silicon Valley. If modeling giant OpenAI really is still in the red when running its models, what could this mean for massive investments with jaw-dropping valuations for the rest of the AI world?
OpenAI declined to comment. Microsoft did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
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