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OpenAI resets spending expectations, from $1.4T to $600B
- givemeethekeys 8mo agoSo handwavy... 1.4T.. 600B. Pure marketing fluff to keep the hype machine going.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- lumost 8mo agoDidn't oracle take out real loans and spend real dollars based on this commitment?
- dragonwriter 8mo agoWasn't it always an expectation, not a commitment? If they didn't appropriately account for risk that the expectation would not pan out, well, that's on them.
- lupire 8mo agoHow do you account for the risk of something that has ever happened before?
- quesera 8mo agoIn the standard risk assessment and mitigation manner: imperfectly, but with the best information available at the time.
- dragonwriter 8mo agoI dunno, but if someone is saying they expect to spend a vast, unprecedented sum of money acquiring an interdependent set of resources that current production could not come anywhere close to accommodating in multiple dimensions, and which money they don’t have and aren’t making in their current operations so that it would also require unprecedented fundraising on top of the other issues, you’d probably want to do some work to verify the plausibility before putting your own resources at risk for the chance of profiting from that spending spree. Extraordinary claims and all.
- Yizahi 8mo agoThe bankruptcy couldn't happen to nicer company.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- mnky9800n 8mo agoI too have reset my spending expectations down from $1.4T.
- johnwheeler 8mo agobest comment
- AvAn12 8mo agoA wise move.
- kylehotchkiss 8mo agough lower the interest rates Jerome, I'll do anything to tank the economy until you finally do.
- rhelz 8mo agoI have done my fair share of misunderestimating before, but I've never been off by that much.
- nova22033 8mo agoand that's just my doordash order..
- paxys 8mo ago> OpenAI is projecting that its total revenue for 2030 will be more than $280 billion For context, that is more than the annual revenue of all but 3 tech companies in the world (Nvidia, Apple, Google), and about the same as Microsoft. OpenAI meanwhile is projected to make $20 billion in 2026. So a casual 1300% revenue growth in under 4 years for a company that is already valued in the hundreds of billions. Must be nice to pull numbers out of one's ass with zero consequence.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 8mo agoI like the little blurb at the end which said that Codex had 1.5 million users. So, if you can get each of them to pony up a mere $186k a piece, they can hit those revenue numbers.
- sunaookami 8mo agoDon't forget that Codex is free until March so the numbers are heavily inflated.
- lm28469 8mo ago> Codex had 1.5 million users I'm three of them and I never spent a cent on any llms, I doubt I'm the only one
- Betelbuddy 8mo agoIts a circular economy...He is talking about the money moving from Nvidia to OpenAI and back to Nvidia. You got to go with the flow... He is counting on hundreds of husbands: https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
- YetAnotherNick 8mo agoHow will Nvidia give revenue to OpenAI?
- AtheistOfFail 8mo ago
- tyre 8mo agoIt’s interesting that they felt the need to leak this to the press.[0] Some investors or partners (or LPs, board members, etc. of those) are getting spooked by the spending plans and rightfully questioning if the return is there. Putting it in public my feel like a stronger commitment (though I doubt it.) Even with the revised numbers, I cannot believe that they’ll have $280bn in revenue by 2030. [0]: You can tell by the reason the sources are granted anonymity: because the information is private, not because they aren’t authorized to speak on the matter
- carefree-bob 8mo agoThese numbers were always out of line with basic infrastructure constraints. People were talking like the US would build 50 new nuclear power plants in 10 years. And I believe we will not see $600B either, there are basic infrastructure, permitting, and power delivery limits.
- 0cf8612b2e1e 8mo agoHowever, we are all going to be paying higher energy costs for these ridiculous infrastructure claims. Utilities typically price out energy three years in advance. If they were protecting for twice as many energy sinks, that represents an enormous amount of generation capacity which needs to be accounted for in projections. I saw a report that previous capacity pricing was $28/MWh/day. Latest numbers have shot up to $300.
- carefree-bob 8mo agoAbsolutely, and that's why we should be applying higher infrastructure fees to the permitting of data centers. The problem is that local governments want the tax revenue and are willing to screw over their constituents. This also goes in line with the decline of local newspapers, there is an epidemic of fraud and abuse of power happening in local governments across the country.
- rchaud 8mo agoIt's not unforeseeable that the US demarcates Special Economic Zones without environmental oversight or labor regulations to speed up the construction.
- conception 8mo agoNothing like superfund sites and The Jungle to feel like a true patriot again.
- mike_hearn 8mo agoThat's why Elon is betting on datacenters in sun-synchronous orbit.
- cmiles8 8mo agoThis is more complicated than just hand wavy spending expectation resets. Other companies were taking these “commitments” and gearing up for capital investments to meet all that demand which is now vaporizing. That creates a big mess as the hype AI hype machine starts to unravel. This looks very much like a careful move to deflate the bubble without popping it, but we’ve likely passed that point.
- locusofself 8mo agoThe market is spooked by capex projections generally. Interesting that Microsoft, despite some apparent hesitation in 2025, seems to be still going all in on AI spend over the next several years according to the most recent earnings call.
- agentifysh 8mo agoMS, GOOG bonds being sold to fund capex still put them green $/employee, they will survive of not thrive. OpenAI...not so sure, they need an IPO soon while public still is high off the double bull run post 2020
- oxag3n 8mo agoWe are at the end of the exponential! 90% chance in 6-12 months spending expectations drop to $0.
- iSloth 8mo agoBased on what? Each model so far has been noticeably better than the last, so I don’t see why the next wouldn’t be too?
- oxag3n 8mo ago"Can’t you just draw an exponential line on the curve?" - Dario Amodei, February 13th 2026. But this time draw it for spending expectations.
- quesera 8mo agoAre you predicting that OpenAI is out of business in 6-12 months? I'm not an AI booster, and I don't see "sustainable" in the current markets, but I'd take the other side of that bet!
- janalsncm 8mo agoEven if that were true, it wouldn’t make the growth exponential. There are many other trajectories out there.
- iSloth 8mo agoEven if it’s not exponential, I still can’t see logic in it going to zero.
- ryandvm 8mo agoI don't get it. A trillion here, a trillion there and all the AI companies are also telling us they're planning on wiping out 2/3 of jobs in the next 10 years? Nothing about the economics of the AI boom makes any sense. I'm not saying it's not possible, but if we wipe out 2/3 of jobs with AI, who is going to be buying *all the stuff*? Unemployed people aren't much of a demographic, and you can't just say UBI because that doesn't make sense either. You think the billionaires are going to allow themselves to be taxed heavily enough to support UBI just so that there's a market for people to buy stuff from them? That's nonsense. Not trying to creep anybody out, but I just don't see a stable outcome for a society that doesn't need 2/3 of the population.
- tgrowazay 8mo ago> You think the billionaires are going to allow themselves to be taxed heavily enough to support UBI They will have no choice. Proletariat must not be hungry and agitated. Free legal MJ for everyone!
- irishcoffee 8mo agoA gramme a day...
- llIIllIIllIIl 8mo agoKeeps the doctor away?
- irishcoffee 8mo agoIt’s from a book called Brave New World. If you want some light reading: 1984, brave new world, and atlas shrugged will mostly get you caught up on current events.
- hxbdg 8mo ago[dead]
- rustyhancock 8mo ago
- Saig6 8mo agoThe 1.4T commitments was over 8 years, not by 2030. https://x.com/sama/status/1986514377470845007 https://x.com/sama/status/1986514377470845007
- blitzar 8mo agothe tweet has capital letters and punctuation - I doubt the authenticity of this post
- kjkjadksj 8mo agoSo does that mean they aren’t buying up all storage production capacity for the foreseeable future now?
- louiereederson 8mo agoThis article is bad. It is mixing up capex and opex. OpenAI is projecting more spending on compute through their income statement now than they were 6 months ago.
- jjkaczor 8mo agoSo are all the RAM, GPU and HD manufacturers going to honour their purchasing commitments?
- snowhale 8mo ago[dead]
- time2buybitcoin 8mo ago[dead]
- basilgohar 8mo agoMaybe we'll get cheap HBM DIMMs in a year or two due to this oversupply. We gotta think positive!
- ralusek 8mo agoHas AI transformed the economy radically? Yes. Will it continue to transform the economy radically? Yes. Will that translate to the model-makers somehow capturing the entire value of the transformed economy? No. There were a few key moments that revealed this. When OpenAI initially declared "there is no moat," I wasn't sure whether to believe them. GPT 3.5 and 4 were so much better than the competition, it felt like them saying that they had no moat was some sort of attempt to avoid regulation or scrutiny. But then, lo and behold, Claude and Gemini caught up; there really was no moat. But up until then, while it was clear that there was no moat around OpenAI, it was unclear if there was a moat around big tech. Mistral was meh. Even Meta's were meh. We also had no idea how much these models actually cost to run. It wasn't until the "DeepSeek moment," and especially once these open source models actually started being hosted on third party services, that it became clear that this was actually a competitive landscape. And as has already been demonstrated, because the interface for all of these models is just plain language, the cost of switching models is basically non-existent.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- random3 8mo ago"there is no moat" usually mean "we have no moat" or "we want you to believe we have no moat". There are always moats, like being directly in front of eyes and thumbs (Apple) or having extensive data (Google) along hardware production capabilities, datacenters, and tons of money.
- tiahura 8mo agoHas AI transformed the economy radically? Yes. AI made “basically zero” difference in U.S. economic growth last year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZHN0-ZNe_4&t=399s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zZHN0-ZNe_4&t=399s
- agentifysh 8mo agoas I've said previously, OpenAI will be bailed out by US taxpayers. This isnt just another bubble, its a bubble within a bubble. Seeing the same setup in 2008 and now. Enjoy your subsidized $200/month codex because its going to go up in the future. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439545
- chasd00 8mo agofirst bullet from the link > After previously boasting $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments, OpenAI is now telling investors that it plans to spend $600 billion by 2030. does the word "commitment" have a different meaning in this context? How do you cut a commitment >50%? OpenAI's partners are making decisions based on the previous commitment because.. OpenAI committed to it. I must be completely wrong because how does this not set off a severe chain reaction? edit: as others have pointed out, the article is misleading. $1.4T was over 8 years or by 2034. 2030 is halfway to 2034 and $600B is not too far from half of $1.4T.
- fxtentacle 8mo agoI think TSMC laughed them out of the room when they announced the original numbers. So maybe there’s no reaction now because everyone already knew not to trust OpenAI’s promises.
- just-the-wrk 8mo ago[flagged]
- fred_is_fred 8mo agoThese were more like infrastructure suggestions.
- raincole 8mo ago> how does this not set off a severe chain reaction? Just like you and me, Sam Altman can say anything he likes to say. To pump the investors' confidence, to make the US administration believe he's serious about AGI, or just to make himself feel good. It's not legally binding in any way. You should never read it as "OpenAI committed to..." but as "Altman said these words..." and words mean very little today.
- gehsty 8mo agoIt is insane that they have this little of a handle on their buildout. It makes the $600B feel even more empheral.
- Imustaskforhelp 8mo agoFrom another comment I wrote here but I am gonna paste a quote I found from Intelligent Investor (page 13) from Isaac Newton during the hottest stock of his time in his country, South Sea company. The great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people" There seems to be a lot of madness happening in the world again as well. A lot of OpenAI claims make no sense except if we consider the world to have gone mad. The bubbly nature of openAI and just doing whatever they think like doing with 0 regards to anything or everything including financials is a form of madness. I was reading another comment and actually opened up the Intelligent Investor book to read the quote from there. I highly recommend that book although truth be told that I haven't read more than the first 50-100 pages as I quickly felt like passive investment is a great vehicle personally.
- surgical_fire 8mo agoIt doesn't matter. Both numbers are fictional. No one really expects any of this to be true. The people who claim to believe this are simply lying.
- umairnadeem123 8mo ago[dead]
- agentifysh 8mo agoits going to get cheaper but the new hardware will still be out of limits for consumers and they need to provide returns on the shares aka wealth transfer from taxpayers + subscribers to shareholders. but even by some miracle they get to 60% margins are there even enough subscribers to make OpenAI as profitable as Microsoft?
- chaos_emergent 8mo agoI feel like the dropping cost of using AI doesn't tell the full story - I feel like I'm using agents easily a hundred to two hundred times more than I used chat interfaces. The build-out seems entirely reasonable if we believe that there's going to be a similar increase in usage through the rest of the economy as user interfaces are figured out for these models.
- vfclists 8mo agoDoes this mean RAM is going to get cheaper?
- HackerThemAll 8mo agoPonzi scheme. Scam. I don't trust OpenAI a tiny bit.
- ares623 8mo agoyou mean Altman scheme.
- adverbly 8mo agoWhat do we think? Is this possible without AGI level breakthroughs? If we see a continuation or even a slowdown of the current trend, the technology overhang, lagging productization, and catch up from the slow adoption of AI by businesses probably gets them part of the way there, but I don't know about 1000% growth at this point... Seems kinda like they're banking on another breakthrough no? And if they don't get the breakthrough, the downside risks such as a competitor of some sort destroying their margin can't exactly be ignored...
- anizan 8mo agoOpenAI doesnt have a single model in top 10 models being used on openrouter.ai Thats a weekly metric on https://openrouter.ai/rankings https://openrouter.ai/rankings flagship chatgpt 5.2 model is at #16 PMF is now evolving when competitor models are either smarter or cheaper.
- mrkeen 8mo agoI hadn't heard of openrouter.ai. I have heard of OpenAI. Is this like Windows and MacOS not being in the top 10 of distrowatch.com?
- sadeshmukh 8mo agoOpenRouter is the leading place to go to to get general purpose models of all sorts. It's fairly popular, and processes tens of trillions of tokens a year.
- oezi 8mo agoI think the primary issue is that the metric is tokens and not dollars spent.
- sadeshmukh 8mo agoOpenRouter is valued at >$500m and processes >$100m/year, 5% of which goes to them. Not that large compared to e.g. OpenAI, but it's the largest that doesn't produce its own models & with the largest selection I'm aware of.
- Garlef 8mo agoCould also just be a bias in the audience
- btown 8mo agoOpenAI, frankly, benefits from the "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" phenomenon. And there's a reason that OpenRouter has an OpenAI compatible layer highlighted not deep in docs, but on their Quickstart page: https://openrouter.ai/docs/quickstart#using-the-openai-sdk https://openrouter.ai/docs/quickstart#using-the-openai-sdk The number of projects accessing OpenAI directly, who might only reach for OpenRouter once an alternative is desired, is unknowable (since OpenAI doesn't share usage statistics), but likely meaningful.
- nova22033 8mo agoWasn't most of this spending going to ORCL? https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/ORCL https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/ORCL Remember this press conference? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYUoANr3cMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYUoANr3cMo
- throw_rust 8mo agoThey sure are humble for people who say they are building God.
- xiphias2 8mo agoAm I the only one here who was amazed by the speed of improvement between 5.2-codex and 5.3-codex? I feel that Sam is saying what investors want to hear, but the coding work it is capable of and how it improved with using the terminal (TerminalBench) in such a short time is something that I'm sure can't be seen by short term revenue projections. I'm sure the other AI companies are having the same speedups, but it's real. The usual limit is of course the slop output that is not well modularized that makes it hard to do bigger things, and codex is terrible at refactoring into the right direction (it has no taste). 3x YoY growth in revenue is just not hard to imagine with this kinds of models, I think they have to get out with more expensive parallel working agents and higher-than-pro subscriptions, but it is coming I'm sure.
- Ms-J 8mo agoClosedAI isn't worth even a million at the end of the day. Open source models catch up quickly and eventually even large models could be run locally.
- duxup 8mo agoI'm not convinced that companies venturing into the unknown really know more than anyone else, they just survive or don't. I've no idea what OpenAI is up to and honestly the public actions of Sam & Co seem like they feel kinda insecure about their position... whatever that position is.