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Is AI Profitable Yet?
- hootz 4mo agoSo Nvidia is basically farming everyone else?
- somat 4mo agoIt's the parable about how in a gold rush you want to be the guy selling shovels.
- SXX 4mo agoOther hardware manufacturers also wastly more profitable - RAM, SSD, HDD and literally everyone in datacenter supply chain.
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- bandrami 4mo agoThem and Broadcom
- keyle 4mo agoIt's historically called: selling buckets and shovels during a gold rush. The only way to get consistently rich in any bubble economy.
- DrewADesign 4mo ago[dead]
- frm88 4mo agoYes and shovelling the money around in yet another circle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM,
- turtleyacht 4mo agoDidn't see Radeon, but they have an AI page: https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/radeon-ai.html https://www.amd.com/en/products/graphics/radeon-ai.html
- raincole 4mo agoNow use common accounting standard and amortize the cost. Oh it doesn't fit the narrative. Never mind then.
- locusofself 4mo agoI assume you are saying it would look less ridiculous? By how much?
- collingreen 4mo agoIn what ways do common accounting standards and amortizing the costs (this is tricky for ai and the current batch of gpus I hear!) change the data presented here? Does it detract from the point? Completely contradict it? You can turn your drive-by dismissal into something really informative if you want to.
- raincole 4mo agoFirst of all, the whole website is based on what the CEOs said they're going to spend. Not the actual money spent. So there is no real 'data' presented here or to contradict. Second, even if you take CEOs' words at face value, they didn't distinguish the capex for hardware, electricity, software and salary. You can make up whatever the percentage for hardware and the depreciation rate you believe and fit an arbitrary narrative.
- BirAdam 4mo agoThe depreciation is also insane and thus to sustain operations and improve, the spend will keep going.
- bandrami 4mo agoIf OpenAI and Anthropic adopted GAAP nobody would be able to invest in them it would be so bad
- unmole 4mo agoYeah, institutional investors who plowed billions into them are unsophisticated rubes who got hoodwinked because they don't get GAAP. And it's not like both OpenAI and Anthropic are both going to IPO soon which would require disclosures far beyond GAAP numbers. /s
- rohitsriram 4mo ago[dead]
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- c0rruptbytes 4mo agoDeepseek is really killing it if that's their total spend
- keyle 4mo agoYeah. Meta on the other hand. Ouch.
- hootz 4mo agoApparently their strategy is to dump a fuckton of money in hopes that that will make them dominate the market, just like they did with the metaverse thing. It's like a hobbyist who buys the most expensive gear on the first day of trying out a new hobby.
- keyle 4mo agoI thought it was to burn the planet so as long as one island remains untouched.
- hootz 4mo agoRight? Their V4 model is too good for them to be spending less than 1% of what Anthropic is.
- conradkay 4mo agohttps://www.techinasia.com/news/chinas-deepseek-eyes-10b-funding-at-45b-valuation https://www.techinasia.com/news/chinas-deepseek-eyes-10b-fun... Would be weird if they're raising $10 billion after spending only 0.3 https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/deepseek-debates https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/deepseek-debates Probably more like 3-4 billion by now?
- rdl 4mo agoFor a rapidly growing new line of business, this isn't bad at all.
- locusofself 4mo agocertainly will be interesting to find out..
- emacdona 4mo agoYeah, my first impression when I saw this was: if this is accurate, the situation is not nearly as bad as I thought. I do wonder why Nvida is included, though. If you include the company that all of the frontier models are pouring money into, of course the net (expenditure - profits) of the collective is going to be closer to zero :-)
- SXX 4mo agoProblem is not profitability as is. Nvidia's net of circular funding is the problem though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM
- emacdona 4mo agoAdditionally: If Nvidia is included, does that mean that the money Amazon, Microsoft, and Oracle get for selling compute to the frontier models are included in their revenue? Because for Amazon in particular, the situation this pages shows is actually much WORSE than I expected. I thought they were making a killing selling compute for model training.
- orblivion 4mo agoYeah they should also include the power companies for that matter.
- bandrami 4mo agoUnfortunately the green bars are not just EBITDA, they're before discounts.
- diziet 4mo ago
- SXX 4mo agoTo be honest whatever author wanted to say there three categories of AI related companies: hardware manufacturers, cloud providers and purely AI companies. Only the later have something to lose if AI bubble gone by tomorrow. Everyone else will just stay with grown capacity and reuse infrastructure for whatever. Not listing other hardware companies is just dishinest. AI is not a crypto mining where resources are just burned.
- flexagoon 4mo ago> Not listing other hardware companies is just dishinest. AI is not a crypto mining where resources are just burned. AI is exactly like crypto mining in that Nvidia is the one who profited from both
- SXX 4mo agoCrypto mining bubble was 99% of speculation plus scams and 1% of R&D for decentralized finance. No matter what happen with the AI bubble text, image and video and other generative neural networks are here to stay. Whatever you like it or not this tech already changed a lot of industries and there is no going back.
- nothercastle 4mo agoBitcoin is here to stay so is crypto but the impact was much more limited then initially predicted
- DrewADesign 4mo agoAnd the money these companies are blowing on all of this shit is banking on them being ‘the’ dominant player in a completely world-changing commodity industry.
- andirk 4mo agoBeing "a" player in a multi-billion $ industry is also pretty good. For example, Bing gets some small % of the search engine market, but that's still a ton of market and $. And Foursquare/Swarm is used by like 0.01% of the population, but they can still map the exact floor plan of Macy's and that Chipotle will lose 30% of their share value from people shiitting blood (both were extremely accurate). And then Bing gets a pretty big upgrade: ChatGPT. And here we are.
- try-working 4mo agoPossibly profitable for New-Gen Labs (DS, Qwen, Kimi, etc) and impossibly unprofitable for the Legacy Labs (OpenAI, Anthropic)
- xorgun 4mo ago[dead]
- beloch 4mo agoRemember the model: 1. Outspend and outlast your competition until you have market dominance. Win over and lock in your customers with sweetheart deals. 2. Enshittify and squeeze your customers to pay back your debt. If you're using AI, you're not paying the true cost right now because we're in phase 1. Be ready for phase 2.
- fc417fc802 4mo agoGiven that the likes of openrouter exist I'm not sure how phase 2 is supposed to work.
- sothatsit 4mo agoOr, tokens are more like energy and prices will drop over time until they reach some equilibrium. The big labs are actively moving into the application layer, where they’ll have more pricing power. Maybe that layer will end up with a Mac (Anthropic) vs Windows (OpenAI) vs Linux (open-source) dynamic as well if they can create a moat. But so far it’s pretty easy to move between providers.
- xigoi 4mo ago> Or, tokens are more like energy and prices will drop over time until they reach some equilibrium. In that case, AI companies will never get their money back, leading to a huge crash.
- crystal_revenge 4mo agoIt’s weird to me that people here suddenly seem to care about profitability for relatively early stage companies just because they’re “AI”. I know a traditional SaaS company I worked for that IPO’d years ago and still has no signs that they can be profitable (and many others like it) and nobody seems particularly concerned.
- squibonpig 4mo agoThe economy is currently kinda riding on them.
- DrewADesign 4mo agoThese companies are blowing through an incomparable amount of resources. If their bravado is misplaced, the economic impacts will be far more significant.
- choilive 4mo agoHow so? Most of these companies will take a hit but will be fine Alphabet, Amazon, Google, etc can write off their entire investments in AI and will be a-OK. The pure AI companies will obviously be dead.
- droidjj 4mo agoThis is what people said about the banks in 2007. Just because the big players’ balance sheets can take the hit doesn’t mean the wider economy is insulated.
- fooker 4mo agoAnd all these banks were bailed out by big brother. So the people were right.
- onetokeoverthe 4mo ago[dead]
- andai 4mo agoThat's pretty funny. For the "yet" part I would have expected a more recent cutoff, rather than the whole history of the companies. (Do they all have some kind of enormous debts they're going to need to pay off for decades once they do become profitable?)
- code_duck 4mo agoI've received some decent benefits from it without paying anything.
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo agoAMD, Alibaba should be on there too. AMD is making good money on AI, with R&D at less than half the AI revenue. Whereas Alibaba's weird financials show it's kinda-sorta-protifable? I just wanna know how the OpenAI/Anthropic shell game works long-term. So both companies made equity deals with infrastructure providers; OpenAI on Azure, Anthropic on AWS, GCloud, and Colossus. They get a loan of compute credits and then pay for the compute with the credits. So the PaaS are effectively giving them free compute, then book it as revenue; and the AI provider lets them do inference and books that as revenue. So, it's like both types of company have a buffet, and let each other eat there for free. But somebody has to actually buy the pasta salad, with real dollars. Afaict, those real dollars are.... the cash reserves of the PaaS. How long are they going to eat into that cash? Microsoft and AWS don't really have their own models, whereas Google and SpaceX do. And while Google has tons of cash, SpaceX is perpetually looking for cash. So the only player here that can actually afford to keep doing this, or leave the game entirely, is Google.
- wmf 4mo agoThere's a lot of revenue and outside investment coming in but the haters pretend it's all circular financing.
- nextaccountic 4mo agoOutside investment is not a revenue, it's looking more like a pyramid scheme. It's yet more people putting their money in the scheme expecting a return Either the actual revenue of paying customers ramp up or the bubble will pop at some point I expect the paying customers will actually be companies buying ad, not people buying AI subscriptions
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- harrall 4mo agoHousehold names like Uber, Amazon, Blue Bottle Coffee and Fedex used the same playbook of burning investors’ cash for years and look where they’re now. Everyone’s long term plan is hoping that they build out and survive long enough that, in the end, the market accepts them. Even your local still-unprofitable restaurant is burning their grandparents’ inheritance money hoping that it works out. But on the other hand, that’s what Theranos, WeWork, and Pets.com tried too.
- samstokes 4mo agoI don't have an MBA or anything but is it common practice to describe "revenue - capex" as "profit"?
- IAmGraydon 4mo agoThis is pretty funny. Now do it without Nvidia and including all costs, not just capex.
- casualscience 4mo agoHow are the Google numbers calculated? I've seen their net income increasing a lot as they've rolled out Gemini. This suggests that Gemini tokens are actually profitable, or at least not extremely unprofitable. Yet this site suggests that tokens are very unprofitable
- girvo 4mo ago> This suggests that Gemini tokens are actually profitable, or at least not extremely unprofitable. Out of all the companies, considering their own silicon etc. I wouldn't be surprised. Though I do wonder in terms of total CapEx and R&D where it would be at...
- nothercastle 4mo agoI mean yes they are serving ads off websites they Plagiarized with AI. So if you use ai to serve up content you don’t own as your property then perhaps you can make money. The cost is that they are completely killing the creators
- missedthecue 4mo agoThe site doesn't suggest anything useful. It's more of a fun meme. Building a datacenter that will produce hundreds of billions of dollars worth of tokens over a multi-decade life shouldn't surprise anyone that it's in the red in year 1 or 2. There's a lot of front loaded capex in this business. If someone built a tractor factory you wouldnt expect 1 year payback. But the site sort of implies that these companies are selling tokens for less than it takes to inference them. As if this is some sort of COGS ledger. Especially by throwing Nvidia in there. Don't take it too seriously.
- crowbahr 4mo agoGoogle is making money on selling cloud compute. Their margins have gone from 9% to 32%. They're soaking up the investor bonanza into AI - Gemini ain't making them money. For context Cloud Compute made 20bn in Q1, Other services made 90bn.
- casualscience 4mo ago
- firecall 4mo agoIs the "$ Spent on AI since page load" broadly indicative of spend at all, or just a fun animation?
- timonoko 4mo agoGemini now remembers you wholesale and makes good analogies and shortcuts knowing youres personal capabilities. You are already hooked and paying starts any day now. Or maybe it starts recommending some marvellous products somewhat related to your query.
- y1n0 4mo agonice pkd reference
- cat_plus_plus 4mo agoYes, I spend my days writing lots of code using AI (I do rigorously review it, it's still much faster than hand typing) and I get paid enough for it to pay mortgage and send kids to college.
- blindriver 4mo agoAnthropic is going to be profitable in the June quarter https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-revenue-explosive-growth-ipo-profitable-quarter.html https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/20/anthropic-revenue-explosive-...
- MadxX79 4mo agoBut then go right back to being unprofitable again afterwards, which is a little weird.
- mhjkl 4mo agoReminds me of the “Has The Turing Test Been Passed” website. It says no, but if you read on they cite “The relatively minimal funding allocated to AI research” as one of the reasons AI hasn’t been achieved “yet”. Website stopped being updated before it became relevant, so you will never see it say “yes”, similarly to how the Loebner prize mysteriously vaporized when GPT-2 came out, just when winning it for real started becoming an interesting possibility
- charcircuit 4mo agoThis ignores how much the stock has grown due to AI. Also many of these companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta drive a lot of incremental value due to both AI powered content suggestion and AI powered ad suggestion. Personalized ads has driven a ton of revenue.
- abathologist 4mo agoGood point. We mustn't forget the magical money box: that's where the real value is delivered!
- charcircuit 4mo agoIf you can spend $1 to raise the value of your company by $2 it makes sense to do regardless of if that $1 is directly earning a profit.
- conradkay 4mo agoThe numbers for Meta are pretty misleading, I assume the $3 billion is something like direct generative AI revenue? Sure they're torching money on building consumer LLMs, but they seem to be doing very well optimizing things like ad ranking https://engineering.fb.com/2025/11/10/ml-applications/metas-generative-ads-model-gem-the-central-brain-accelerating-ads-recommendation-ai-innovation/ https://engineering.fb.com/2025/11/10/ml-applications/metas-... https://engineering.fb.com/2026/03/31/ml-applications/meta-adaptive-ranking-model-bending-the-inference-scaling-curve-to-serve-llm-scale-models-for-ads/ https://engineering.fb.com/2026/03/31/ml-applications/meta-a...
- throwaway85825 4mo agoIsn't ad ranking just SORT price;
- OsrsNeedsf2P 4mo agoAssuming you're not trolling, there's a few other things to consider - 1/ User targeting is complex - you can charge more for ads if the users you're showing the ads to click 2/ Ads impact user retention - you need to balance making money and keeping users around 3/ AI generated ads - this is a pretty big thing now, where instead of bringing your own media, you just describe your target audience and the AI will A/B test media + CTAs for you 4/ Integrity - you want to vet the ads against laws/site policies Probably forgetting a few, but there's a reason the ad industry employs so many
- throwaway85825 4mo agoI've heard of the ad auction and assumed the point of the auction was to maximize price. As for integrity ad platforms don't have any. Most of the ads seem to be for scams. The first search result for OBS is usually malware. Scammers have a low cost to advertise because they use stolen credit cards. Advertisers don't mind because the charge back doesn't cost them, COGS is near 0.
- jwitthuhn 4mo agoFor immediate revenue yes, but if you want advertisers to keep coming back you need to give them a good conversion rate.
- beej71 4mo agoNvidia making out selling shovels, that's for sure.
- ZetsuBouKyo 4mo agoI am relatively pessimistic about the profitability of those panning for gold in the downstream AI market. The core bottlenecks are power and computing capacity, and they actually trace back to the exact same issue. It all comes down to the physical energy it takes to flip or move a single bit inside the ram or disk storage. This concept is subject to fundamental physical barriers. There are a few ways to tackle this, like improving power efficiency, reducing model size, or pushing hardware further. However, achieving orders-of-magnitude improvement in any of these areas will cost a massive amount of time and money. I wonder if governments, corporations, and investors have the patience to wait for these tech breakthroughs.
- burnerRhodov3 4mo agoXai is making 1.25B a month off it's compute? Why is that not listed?
- PinkaDunka 4mo agoOh wow, they already got 50% of investments back in roughly three years? This is going to be insane money making machine. Or is it not the point op was trying to make?
- 0xbadcafebee 4mo agoKeep in mind that some of the revenue booked is due to circular deals. AWS for example gives Anthropic "cpu credits" that Anthropic spends on AWS, and AWS books that as revenue. The reverse is true too: Anthropic gives AWS inference credits and Anthropic books that as revenue. When it's really just a pre-existing server sitting there and two companies claiming they made money off it. There are also equity deals going on the same way; they give each other stock, (or one gives the other stock in exchange for GPUs) and both benefit as the stocks get inflated despite there not really being more value.
- bze12 4mo agoComparing fixed costs to revenue? Even if it’s cumulative this seems like a disingenuous framing
- sunkeeh 4mo agoThis site is going to start doing the opposite of the author's intentions in a couple of years.
- TOMDM 4mo agoAI startups taking unprofitable risky ventures in search of growth opportunity and future returns makes sense to me. Maybe most of them or all of them lose on their bets, but there's potential for a future where revenue grows beyond the immense capex and research investments. Oracle though... Immensely risky capex to service a startup industry with what will soon be a commodity...
- acoward113472 4mo agoI don’t think this website is fair. It does not factor in productivity increase and ROI from other areas that utilize AI to complete what they were doing. For example, if a new operating system was built into AI, the profit for that would go towards increased sales of licenses but this site seems to only track return on AI businesses
- daveguy 4mo agoCool. Why don't you build that?
- ekianjo 4mo agoMost startups are deep in the red for years before they even have any revenue. Is that any different?
- ch_fr 4mo agoThe difference between serving 1 and 1 billion http queries is not the same as the difference between generating 1 and 1 billion tokens. The startup blitz-scaling-market-capturing playbook makes makes sense when you spend to scale, not when you spend because you scale, yeah, I understand that step 2 is "and now you squeeze the users", but it will need to be by such a bigger factor...
- dnnddidiej 4mo agoDid someone say shovels?
- qmr 4mo agoSell shovels.
- hn_throwaway_99 4mo agoI know not the point, but is "PNL" a term people use now vs P&L?
- alemseo 4mo agoNVidia showing so much profit, even they have acceess to some models like QWEN for free. Talking about Anthropic and OpenAI, they charge so much, I dont understand this graph.
- mullingitover 4mo agoAre we ignoring the 15 billion/yr deal with SpaceX/"Xai" and Anthropic?[1] Or is that not booked revenue yet? [1] https://www.wired.com/story/spacex-ipo-anthropic-compute-finances-risks/ https://www.wired.com/story/spacex-ipo-anthropic-compute-fin...
- gield 4mo agoFor some use cases, AI has been profitable for at least a decade.
- gamander2 4mo ago[dead]
- cindyllm 4mo ago[dead]
- scotty79 4mo agoWow, the industry is only 50% in the hole during such a massive buildout that overburdens supply chains of such basic and general resources as energy and chips? This is going to be insanely profitable in less than a decade. I'd be delighted if a business I had put 100k in aleready had a 50k return, after first 3 years or so, while I'm buliding it in conditions where everybody else is doing pretty much the same.
- tim333 4mo agoTechnically, the site doesn't show profits, it shows something like cash flow excluding investment flows, or has more money been spent than has come back in from customers. This will always be negative for any new business as you are effectively depreciating the assets straight away. Like if you build a hotel and deduct the cost of building it from room income - it would take years before you get the money back but may be quite profitable with GAAP accounting. GAAP accounting (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) is what's used for official reporting and tax returns but excludes any increases in IP value or goodwill unless there's a buyout. If you included those the likes of OpenAI or Anthropic would have done pretty well. I'm not sure there's a word for that but basically value of the business less the money that's gone in. It doesn't get reported because 'value of the business' is guesswork and can be prone to BS but is pretty important to real world outcomes. AI is probably doing well on that one. Maybe why >Is AI Profitable Yet? NO. Everyone's Broke. doesn't fit with the top companies on the list having many billions in the bank.
- clearstack 4mo ago[dead]
- sph 4mo agoWhy does NVIDIA, the most profitable AI company, not simply eat all the other non-profitable AI companies?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- shanewei 4mo ago[flagged]
- captkraken 4mo agothe old adage "During a gold rush, sell shovels." remains undefeated.