OpenAI is projecting unprecedented revenue growth

OpenAI is projecting unprecedented revenue growth | Epoch AI 

 
 
 

 

 

 
 
Gradient Updates shares more opinionated or informal takes on big questions in AI progress. These posts solely represent the views of the authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Epoch AI as a whole.
 Epoch’s new AI companies database shows the remarkable level and pace of growth of OpenAI’s revenue. It first exceeded $1 billion in 2023 and will exceed $10 billion in 2025. This is impressive, but not unprecedented — a few other companies have matched this growth rate historically.

 OpenAI’s projections, however, are a different story. According to The Information , in Q3 2025 OpenAI projected its 2028 revenue to be $100 billion. I couldn’t find any examples of a company growing its revenue from around $10 billion to $100 billion in such a short period of time.

 What happens if OpenAI falls short of these projections? At a minimum, it would likely have to scale back its plans for large compute build-outs. The recently-announced deals with Nvidia, AMD, and Broadcom imply expenditures of roughly $1.3 trillion within the next decade, and some of this is presumably expected to be financed by revenue or debt raised against revenue. 1 

 But the second-order effects of a miss could be larger. This is because investors and other companies are increasingly betting big on OpenAI being highly valuable. As Noah Smith recently wrote , these bets depend not only on this value being realized, but on it being realized fast enough to cover the debt used to finance the bets. Failing to deliver value as fast as investors expected is all it took to turn several historical technology booms into busts.

 We don’t know how sensitive the AI financing system is to OpenAI’s specific projections. It’s possible that there is a big margin of error and the tenor of the deals is, “Even if we miss our revenue projections, we all still get rich.” But it seems just as possible that more is at stake.

 One thing we can say: OpenAI hitting its projections would be a historic achievement.

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 OpenAI’s revenue grew very quickly from $1B to $10B

 I found four instances of US companies in the past fifty years growing their revenue from less than $1 billion to over $10 billion over the course of three years. 2 3 It’s a somewhat eclectic group.

 The one company to clearly cross these thresholds faster than OpenAI was the vaccine maker Moderna, whose revenue spiked in 2021 due to the pandemic. Another demand-driven entry is Cheniere Energy (2015–2018), which rode the US natural gas boom. Uber (2014–2017) and Google (2002-2005) are familiar tech startup success stories.

 Being a pure software company, Google may be the most apt comparison to OpenAI. Of these four, only Google went on to hit $100 billion revenue. The others have yet to pass $40 billion.

 OpenAI’s recent growth does look fast compared to the others. It is currently growing around 3× per yea

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