Exclusive: Here's How Much OpenAI Spends On Inference And Its MSFT Revenue Share
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 687 Ratings
🗓️ 12 November 2025
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
In a Better Offline exclusive, Ed Zitron reveals how much OpenAI spent on inference in 2024 and 2025, as well as how much it paid Microsoft as part of its 20% revenue share. Inference costs are much higher - and implied revenues much lower - than previously reported.
(Free) Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/oai_docs/
The Information - OpenAI’s First Half Results: $4.3 Billion in Sales, $2.5 Billion Cash Burn - https://www.theinformation.com/articles/openais-first-half-results-4-3-billion-sales-2-5-billion-cash-burn?rc=kz8jh3
The Information (reference to $6bn inference spend) - http://theinformation.com/articles/openai-forecasts-revenue-topping-125-billion-2029-agents-new-products-gain?rc=kz8jh3
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:06.7 | Hello and welcome to a very special episode of BetRofLine. |
| 0:12.1 | I'm of course your host, Ed Zetron. |
| 0:18.9 | For years, I've been hunting down the core details behind OpenAI's costs and revenues, |
| 0:26.5 | and today I'm going to bring you some of them. |
| 0:28.9 | A lot of what I say today is going to be reflected in my newsletter, which I'll link to in the notes. |
| 0:33.3 | Based on documents viewed by my newsletter, I'm able to report OpenAI's inference spend on Microsoft Azure, |
| 0:39.1 | in addition to its payments to Microsoft as part of its 20% revenue share agreement, |
| 0:43.1 | which was reported in October 2024 by the information. |
| 0:46.4 | In simple terms, that last bit means that Microsoft receives 20% of OpenAI's revenue, |
| 0:51.1 | in addition to whatever it spends on GPUs and servers. |
| 0:55.8 | As a reminder, |
| 0:59.5 | inferences the process through which a model creates an output, which I'll be reminding you of a few times, because it's actually kind of important. Now, a few notes. I don't have |
| 1:04.9 | OpenAI's training spend, nor do I have information on the entire extent of OpenAI's revenues, |
| 1:10.1 | as it appears that Microsoft shares |
| 1:11.6 | some percentage of its revenue from Bing, as well as 20% of the revenue Microsoft receives |
| 1:16.0 | from selling OpenAI's models on this year. What I do have, as I've mentioned, is its inference |
| 1:21.7 | spend. And if you're new to this, like I said, this means all the computations OpenAI does |
| 1:26.6 | when processing requests sent to its |
| 1:28.0 | services like ChatGPT and SORA. Now, before publishing, I asked the Financial Times reporter to help corroborate |
| 1:34.5 | some of the data in the documents. They reached out to Microsoft and OpenAI, who both declined to comment. |
... |
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