OpenAI Went From $5.09 Billion Net Loss in 2024 to $38.53 Billion Net Loss in 2025

Support CleanTechnica’s work through a Substack subscription or on Stripe.

I don’t recall a buzzword being as obsessively used as “AI” is today. Everything is being boosted by AI or made possible because of AI or will make you more money because of AI. It’s everywhere — because if you haven’t gotten on the AI bandwagon by now, you must be behind, and that would be bad news for your company.

One of the problems is that companies using AI a lot are having a hard time providing to themselves that it’s worth the money. But there’s a bigger industry problem beneath that. Even with prices that may not be worth the product’s use, the companies providing AI services are massively subsidizing the product. Uh oh….

Let me say this before someone jumps on me: Yes, AI is good and useful for some things. In fact, for some focused things, I do think it should be used and improved. Broadly, though, it seems AI comes at much higher cost than worth.

Just on the financial side of things, I just read that OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT) went from a $5.09 billion net loss in 2024 to a $38.53 billion net loss in 2025. That’s according to leaked OpenAI audited financial statements that were published by Ed Zitron and verified by the Financial Times.

Here were some of the key 2024 numbers:

“OpenAI Had $3.7 Billion In Revenue, $12.4 Billion In Costs and Expenses, and a net loss attributable to the company of $5.09 Billion.

• Revenue: $3.7 billion
• Cost of Revenue: $2.65 billion
• Research and Development: $7.81 billion
• Sales and Marketing: $1.11 billion
• General and Administrative: $907 Million
• Total Costs and Expenses: $12.48 billion
• Loss from Operations: $8.78 billion”

And here were those figures for 2025:

“OpenAI Had $13.07 Billion In Revenue, $34 Billion In Costs and Expenses, and $20.92 Billion In Losses, with a net loss attributable to the company of $38.53 Billion

• Revenue: $13.07 billion
• Cost of Revenue: $7.5 billion
• Research and Development: $19.18 billion
• Sales and Marketing: $5.73 billion
• General and Administrative: $1.57 Billion
• Total Costs and Expenses: $34 billion
• Loss from Operations: $20.92 billion”

People can argue that this is the kind of initial investment and financial loss that’s needed to build an AI powerhouse of the future. However, again, companies providing the billions of dollars of revenue are already starting to wonder if they’ve gotten caught up in a hype storm and are getting robbed. What if all the hype dies down and companies pull back their spending, all while these AI companies are still trying to ramp up, have poured more money into capital investments (ahem, xAI/Grok), and are yet to reach financially sustainable economies of scale?

Here at CleanTechnica, I’m sure that we could come together and build a car. Hey, include our readership, and we could build a lot of cars. But, let’s be honest — the quality of the cars would not be good enough to warrant the prices we’d need to charge in order to make a profit. Will AI from the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI ever be good enough to warrant the high costs needed to pay for ginormously large data centers, not to mention software engineers, etc.? I think people are finally starting to get skeptical of that. But we’ll see….

Related story: “Insane” Shortage of Computer Hardware?

Also related story: Trillion-Dollar AI Bubble On Verge Of Popping?

And none of that is even considering the fact that AI data centers are likely to bake and burn our planet, perhaps making the only livable planet we’re aware of largely unlivable.