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> 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 compa
by 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 agoNvidia gives money to OpenAI so they can buy GPUs that don't exist yet with memory that doesn't exist yet so they can plug them into their datacenters that don't exist yet powered by infrastructure that doesn't exist yet so they can all make profit that is mathematically impossible at this point - Stolen from someone else.
- ceejayoz 8mo agoThere are other forms of money transfer than revenue.
- YetAnotherNick 8mo agoYes but we are talking about OpenAI's projected revenue here, not funding.
- Betelbuddy 8mo agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ai-circular-deals/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2026-ai-circular-deals/
- AtheistOfFail 8mo ago> Its a circular economy Garbage in, garbage out, same as before.
- mirekrusin 8mo ago1.4T was estimate by gpt4/5, 600b by gpt5.3? they'll probably fix it just like they did fix strawberry their estimates will drop by ~20x which will be their max as underdog in the race they'll grab fraction of even that where are they planning to get that much money from? by showing adverts for 14h before you can prompt?
- raincole 8mo ago> a casual 1300% revenue growth in under 4 years for a company that is already valued in the hundreds of billions. Such a weird sentence. The correct causality should be: It's valued in the hundreds of billions because the investors expect a 1300% revenue growth.
- AvAn12 8mo agoAnd if we all buy umbrellas, then it will start to rain??
- tibbar 8mo agoThe metaphor for the original post was more like "You're already wearing a raincoat and umbrella, and you're forecasting a flood warning?" So, the flood warning (project revenue) may be completely incorrect, but it's not incongruous with the fact that I'm wearing a raincoat and umbrella (current investor valuation). :-)
- jonas21 8mo agoI mean, if you go outside and everyone else is carrying an umbrella, it's probably going to rain.
- camdenreslink 8mo agoOr the town has been hoodwinked by a smooth talking umbrella salesman.
- highwaylights 8mo agoAgain!?!!
- dwattttt 8mo agoMono! Doh!
- quxbar 8mo agoIf you go outside and they are burning witches, it's best to go along with it.
- ActionHank 8mo agoConsequences come later friendo.
- surgical_fire 8mo ago[flagged]
- re-thc 8mo ago> and about the same as Microsoft > Must be nice to pull numbers out of one's ass with zero consequence. Seems accurate? What they are saying is if Microsoft ends up buying the rest of their shares then i.e. Microsoft's total revenue by 2030 will be more than $280 billion.
- paul7986 8mo agoI was a paying customer ($20 a month) until AI prompted a layoff in my dying field that is web design and front end design coding. Now everytime chatGPT yells at me about memory i tell it fine Im just gonna use Gemini! I bet a lot of ppl are doing the same thing as both sit at the top of the iPhone charts.
- tibbar 8mo agoToday I got a feature request from another team in a call. I typed into our slack channel as a note. Someone typed @cursor and moments later the feature was implemented (correctly) and ready to merge. The tools are good! The main bottleneck right now is better scaffolding so that they can be thoroughly adopted and so that the agents can QA their own work. I see no particular reason not to think that software engineering as we know it will be massively disrupted in the next few years, and probably other industries close behind.
- JohnMakin 8mo agoIt really doesn't matter how "good" these tools feel, or whatever vague metric you want - they hemorrhage cash at a rate perhaps not seen in human history. In other words, that usage you like is costing them tons of money - the bet is that energy/compute will become vastly cheaper in a matter of a couple of years (extremely unlikely), or they find other ways to monetize that don't absolutely destroy the utility of their product (ads, an area we have seen google flop in spectacularly). And even say the latter strategy works - ads are driven by consumption. If you believe 100% openAI's vision of these tools replacing huge swaths of the workforce reasonably quickly, who will be left to consume? It's all nonsense, and the numbers are nonsense if you spend any real time considering it. The fact SoftBank is a major investor should be a dead giveaway.
- nfg 8mo ago> In other words, that usage you like is costing them tons of money Evidence? I’m sure someone will argue, but I think it’s generally accepted that inference can be done profitably at this point. The cost for equivalent capability is also plummeting.
- JohnMakin 8mo agoI didn't think there would need to be more evidence than the fact they are saying they need to spend $600 billion in 4 years on $13bn revenue currently, but here we are. Here you go: https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-500-nasdaq-10-31-2025/card/openai-made-a-12-billion-loss-last-quarter-microsoft-results-indicate-e71BLjJA0e2XBthQZA5X https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp-5...
- akudha 8mo agoI have used AI a bit, like it for a bunch of use cases. But god damn, these numbers are so big. Gotta wonder, are the returns even worth it? RAM prices up, electricity prices up, hard disk prices up… Maybe this is the price to pay for “progress”, but it sure is wild
- m4rtink 8mo agoSimple - they returns are not worth it. :-)
- chrisandchris 8mo agoYou're missing one point: they are just talking about revenue. Nobody said something about making profit.
- mirekrusin 8mo agoI think he meant for Anthropic?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- TimPC 8mo agoOpenAI is a bet on LLMs replacing a large chunk of the labour force in whatever sector it’s best at replacing. It’s essentially looking to get companies to pay $5k-$10k a month to have coding agents replace the output of a single software engineer. If the S-curve levels off below that level OpenAI will be an unsuccessful company.
- parliament32 8mo agoI, too, can make $280B in revenue by 2030 (by selling $10 bills for $5 (as long as I bamboozle enough investors into giving me sufficient capital, of course)).
- crystal_revenge 8mo agoI honestly don't think that sounds terribly outrageous. OpenAI and Anthropic aren't building companies that aim to be API endpoints or chatbots forever, their vision is clearly: you will do everything through them. The gamble is that this change is going to reach deeper into every business it touches than Microsoft Office ever did, and that this will happen extremely quickly. The way things are headed I increasingly think that's not a terrible bet.
- guelo 8mo agoDoubling every year gets you to 1300% in 4 years. They have exceeded that for the past 5 years.
- avrionov 8mo agoDon't forget that Anthropic also predicts similar revenue in in the next 4 years.
- fxtentacle 8mo agoIf all the AI revenue projections were correct, then 1% of worldwide GDP would end up at AI companies. Or said differently: you buy a sandwich for $5 and somehow AI gets $0.05 out of that transaction.
- jononor 8mo agoThis is basically what happens with the advertising/social media giants (Facebook, Google, etc) because everyone needs msrketing, and mobile companies (Apple, Google) because they handle payments.
- rprend 8mo agoHonestly seems reasonable to me. ChatGPT alone will be be at least as valuable as Google, plus all the enterprise adoption around API use cases.
- tempodox 8mo agoI don’t believe one word of what they say publicly.