After a year of frantic contracting and An impending IPO is rumoredFinancial scrutiny is intensifying on OpenAI. Leaked documents by tech blogger Ed Zitron offer another glimpse into OpenAI’s finances — specifically its revenue and computing costs over the past few years.
Zitron Report This week that in 2024, Microsoft received $493.8 million in revenue share payments from OpenAI. In the first three quarters of 2025, that number jumps to $865.8 million, according to documents he saw.
Leaked documents shed
OpenAI allegedly Shares 20% of its revenue with Microsoft as part of an earlier deal in which the software giant invested $13 billion in powerful AI startups. (Neither the startup nor the people at Redmond have publicly confirmed this percentage.)
Leaked documents shed light into how much OpenAI pays Microsoft
However, this is where things get a little sticky, as Microsoft also shares revenue with OpenAI, kicking ass back About 20% of revenue comes from Bing and Azure OpenAI services, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Bing is powered by OpenAI, and OpenAI sells cloud access to OpenAI’s models to developers and businesses.
The source also told TechCrunch that the leaked figures refer to Microsoft’s share of net income, not total revenue share. In other words, they don’t include what Microsoft pays OpenAI from Bing and Azure OpenAI royalties. Microsoft deducts those figures from its internally reported revenue share numbers, according to this person.
Microsoft doesn’t disclose how much revenue it makes from Bing and Azure OpenAI in its financial statements, so it’s hard to estimate how much the tech giant is falling behind.
Still, the leaked documents provide a window into the hottest company on the private market today — and not just how much revenue it makes, but also how much it’s spending relative to that revenue.
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So, based on that widely reported 20% revenue-share figure, we can estimate OpenAI’s revenue to be at least $2.5 billion in 2024 and $4.33 billion in the first three quarters of 2025 — but could be much higher. Data reported previously 2024 revenue of OpenAI About $4 billion, and its revenue from the first half of 2025 $4.3 billion.
Altman recently said that OpenAI’s revenue was “well above” the report. 13 billion dollars a yearAnnual revenue will end the year above $20 billion at a run rate (which is an estimate, not a guide to actual revenue), and the company could even hit $100 billion by 2027.
According to Zitron’s analysis, OpenAI is expected to spend roughly $3.8 billion in 2024 In the first nine months of 2025, this spending is about $8.65 billion Estimation is the computation used to drive a trained AI model to generate feedback
OpenAI has historically relied almost exclusively on Microsoft Azure to provide compute access, although it has agreements with CoreWeave and Oracle, and more recently with AWS and Google Cloud.
Previous reports have quantified the full computational cost of OpenAI Roughly $5.6 billion for 2024 And at its “revenue cost”. $2.5 billion for the first half of 2025.
A source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that while OpenAI’s training costs are mostly non-cash — meaning, it’s paid for by credits awarded to OpenAI as part of its investment — the firm’s projected spending is largely cash. (Training primarily refers to the computational resources required to train a model.)
While not the full picture, these numbers indicate that OpenAI may be spending more on projected costs than revenue.
And these effects promise to add to the endless AI bubble chatter that has permeated every conversation from New York City to Silicon Valley. If model giant OpenAI is indeed still running its models, what could this mean for the rest of the AI world to invest heavily in jaw-dropping evaluations?
OpenAI declined to comment. Microsoft did not respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.
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