OpenAI expects $278 billion cash burn through 2030 as compute spend hits $856 billion

OpenAI expects to spend $278 billion more money than it generates between 2026 and 2030 due to aggressive spending on compute capacity and adjacent infrastructure, according to a recent presentation seen by the Financial Times. While the company projects nearly 10X revenue growth over the four-year period, the AI developer expects its spending on production capacity and supporting infrastructure to exceed its earnings by over a quarter of a trillion dollars.

OpenAI expects its revenue to increase from $36 billion in 2026 to $350 billion in 2030 and expects to book a total of $840 billion in revenue between now and the end of the decade, according to the presentation, which the company presumably sent to its current and potential investors ahead of its expected IPO. OpenAI plans to spend about $856 billion on computing resources and infrastructure over the same period, its largest expense.

The company also intends to spend an additional $262 billion on other things during the period. As a result, OpenAI forecasts cumulative negative free cash flow of $278 billion from 2026 through 2030. While the sum is massive, this represents an improvement from a projection made in May, when the company expected cumulative negative free cash flow of $305 billion, FT notes.

Financing OpenAI's continuous expansions requires huge amounts of additional capital. OpenAI raised $122 billion in March, but its current financial model indicates that this money could be depleted in 2028, FT reports. The company, recently valued at $852 billion, has already entered discussions about another large investment round. Prospective investors have approached OpenAI about providing capital at a valuation of $1.2 trillion, while a person close to the company said OpenAI is seeking an even higher valuation.

The spending reflects the gargantuan cost of building AI data centers and additional infrastructure to train new AI models and then use them to provide services to clients. Meanwhile, it means OpenAI's revenue growth will lag its spending so much that it will burn $278 billion in four years. To put it into context, $278 billion is only slightly below the Austrian government's $286 billion spending in 2024 and exceeds the annual government expenditures of Indonesia and Norway, at least according to the IMF.

To put the $278 billion figure into a perspective more relevant to OpenAI, it equals four years of $20 monthly subscription fees paid by roughly 290 million people. As of early 2026, OpenAI had over 50 million consumer subscribers (at different plans), over 9 million paying business users (again, at different prices per seat), and more than 900 million weekly active users.

OpenAI had planned an initial public offering for autumn 2026 and confidentially submitted documents to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in June, but later postponed the process, citing increasing public concern about risks associated with rapidly advancing AI systems. Some experts also believe the delay reflects concerns about how public markets would value a company that generates losses that exceed the budgets of countries like Indonesia. Meanwhile, Anthropic is expected to pursue an IPO this autumn that could become the largest ever.

Anton Shilov is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. Over the past couple of decades, he has covered everything from CPUs and GPUs to supercomputers and from modern process technologies and latest fab tools to high-tech industry trends.