OpenAI's ARR Surges 82% to $10 Billion in Six Months

Coin WorldTuesday, Jun 10, 2025 2:10 am ET
2min read

OpenAI, backed by Microsoft, has significantly increased its annual recurring revenue (ARR) from $5.5 billion in December 2024 to $10 billion by June 2025. This substantial growth underscores the strong demand for its AI products, including ChatGPT and various business tools such as its API. The primary revenue driver is ChatGPT Plus subscriptions, which are projected to generate around $8 billion by the end of 2025.

The company's business tools have seen higher adoption rates from enterprises, with the number of paying companies increasing from 2 million in February to 3 million. API access, which allows outside developers to integrate OpenAI's language models into their applications, contributes about a third of the company's total ARR.

Ask Aime: How does OpenAI's revenue surge impact the stock market?

Microsoft's earnings could be even higher, as the $10 billion figure does not include revenue from licensing deals or large one-time contracts with other companies. These deals bring in significant sums but do not recur regularly.

OpenAI's user base is vast, with about 500 million active weekly users. Additionally, between 800 million and 1 billion people globally are using ChatGPT as of mid-2025. The company plans to introduce new pricing models or premium features in 2026 to monetize its massive base of free users. This strategy aims to grow the company more than tenfold in just four years, achieving its goal of $125 billion in annual revenue by 2029. These new strategies are expected to add an extra $25 billion annually in revenue, providing a stronger path toward long-term growth and profitability.

OpenAI's rapid rise in revenue, users, and business adoption sets a benchmark for what AI companies can achieve when their tools become essential to everyday users and global enterprises.

OpenAI is now the world’s second most valuable private tech company, valued at $300 billion, just behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX. Despite strong investor confidence, the company faces pressure to maintain its rapid growth. While revenue is soaring, its operating costs are climbing even faster.

Before considering new spending commitments in 2025, the company reported a loss of around $5 billion in 2024. The firm has been investing heavily in hiring top AI researchers, acquiring design and coding startups, and building powerful computing systems needed to train its large language models. Compute costs likely comprised the largest share of the company’s entire budget, with OpenAI spending around $5 billion on its infrastructure in 2024 alone. This includes high-end chips, massive cloud servers, and custom infrastructure for running AI models.

Industry insiders describe the company’s aggressive spending as a dangerously high burn rate. They suggest it needs more funding because it could run out of money in the next 12 to 18 months. Despite leading in AI innovation and product adoption, OpenAI hasn’t built a business model that can support this scale without external funding.

To address this, OpenAI started one of the largest funding rounds ever for a private tech company, led by Japanese tech conglomerate SoftBank. It raised $40 billion in March 2025. The funding showed that investors have enormous expectations for what OpenAI might become in five to ten years, valuing the company at $300 billion (30 times higher than its annual revenue of $10 billion).

Investors are betting that OpenAI will eventually dominate the consumer and enterprise AI markets and possibly expand into hardware, robotics, and other AI-powered tools. Despite investor optimism, the tech firm still has several years of expected losses ahead, as it admitted that it doesn’t expect to be profitable until 2029. The company admits that it must continue to spend heavily on research, infrastructure, and new product development. It must also deal with legal and regulatory issues, such as copyright lawsuits and questions about how it collects and uses training data.

Competition in the AI industry also puts more pressure on OpenAI to keep investing aggressively because companies like Google DeepMind, Anthropic, and Meta are attracting big enterprise clients and raising billions of dollars with their advanced AI models.