After a year of frantic negotiation and rumors of an upcoming IPOfinancial scrutiny on OpenAI is intensifying. Leaked documents obtained by tech blogger Ed Zitron provide more insight into OpenAI’s finances — specifically, revenue and costing over the past two years.
Citron was mentioned 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 jumped to $865.8 million, according to documents he saw.
OpenAI according to information shares 20% of its revenue with Microsoft as part of a previous deal where the software giant invested over $13 billion in the powerful artificial intelligence startup. (Neither the startup nor the folks at Redmond have publicly confirmed that figure.)
Here’s where things get a little sticky, though, because Microsoft also shares revenue with OpenAI, kicking back about 20% of revenue from Bing and the 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 from Bing and Azure OpenAI royalties. Microsoft subtracts those figures from its internally reported revenue share numbers, according to this person.
Microsoft doesn’t break out how much it earns from Bing and Azure OpenAI in its financial statements, so it’s hard to estimate how much money the tech giant is making back.
But the leaked documents provide a window into the hottest company in private markets today — and not just how much revenue it has, but also how much it’s spending compared to that revenue.
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So based on this widely reported 20% revenue share statistic, we can conclude that OpenAI’s revenue was at least $2.5 billion in 2024 and $4.33 billion in the first three quarters of 2025 — but very likely more. Previous reports from The Information put OpenAI’s revenue for 2024 to about $4 billion and its revenue from the first half of 2025 4.3 billion dollars.
Altman also recently said that OpenAI’s revenue is “much more” than reported $13 billion a yearwill end the year above $20 billion in annualized revenue (which is a forecast, not guidance for actual revenue), and that the company could even reach $100 billion by 2027.
According to Zitron’s analysis, OpenAI may spend about $3.8 billion on inference in 2024. That spending will increase to about $8.65 billion in the first nine months of 2025. Inference is the computation used to run a trained AI model to generate answers.
OpenAI has historically relied almost exclusively on Microsoft Azure to provide computing access, although it has also entered into agreements with CoreWeave and Oracle, and more recently with AWS and Google Cloud.
Previous reports estimated the total computational costs of OpenAI approximately $5.6 billion by 2024 and the “cost of revenue” of $2.5 billion for the first half of 2025;.
A source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that while OpenAI’s training spending is mostly non-cash — that is, paid for by credits that Microsoft awarded OpenAI as part of its investment — the company’s inference spending is largely cash. (Training refers to the computing resources required to initially train a model.)
While not a complete picture, these numbers suggest that OpenAI could be spending more on inference costs than it is earning in revenue.
And these implications promise to add to the relentless AI bubble that has infiltrated every conversation from New York to Silicon Valley. If modeling giant OpenAI is still in the red running its models, what might that mean for the massive investments in eye-popping 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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