Sam Altman says OpenAI will top $20 billion annual revenue this year

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Thursday that the artificial intelligence startup is on track to generate more than $20 billion in annual revenue this year and plans to increase sales to hundreds of billions by 2030.

The company has signed more than $1.4 trillion in infrastructure deals in recent months to build data centers it says are needed to meet growing demand. The staggering sum raised questions from investors and others in the industry about where OpenAI would find the money.

“We are working to build the infrastructure for the AI-powered economy of the future, and given everything we see on the horizon in our research program, it is time to invest to truly scale up our technology,” Altman wrote. a post About X. “Massive infrastructure projects take a lot of time to build, so we need to start now.”

OpenAI was founded in 2015 as a non-profit research laboratory, but has become one of the fastest-growing commercial organizations on the planet following the launch of chatbot ChatGPT in 2022. The startup is now valued at $500 billion, but it’s still not profitable.

In September, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that OpenAI was on track to generate $13 billion in revenue this year.

Friar caught the attention of the Trump administration after saying at an event this week that OpenAI was trying to create an ecosystem of banks, private equity and a federal “backstop” or “guarantee” that could help the company fund its investments in cutting-edge chips.

He wrote these comments late Wednesday: a post OpenAI is not seeking government support for its infrastructure commitments, he said on LinkedIn.

“I used the word ‘backstop’ and that blurred the issue,” Friar wrote. “As the full clip of my answer shows, I was emphasizing that America’s strength in technology will come from building true industrial capacity, which requires the private sector and government to play their roles.”

David Sacks, the venture capitalist who served as President Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, said Thursday that “there will be no federal bailout for AI.” he wrote a post In X, a US pioneer model said that if the company failed, another would take its place.

Altman said Thursday that OpenAI “does not have or seek government guarantees for OpenAI data centers.” He said taxpayers should not bail out companies that make poor decisions, and that “if we get it wrong, that’s on us.”

“That’s the bet we’re making, and we feel good about it given our perspective,” Altman wrote. “But of course we could be wrong, and if we are wrong it will be the market that will deal with that, not the government.”

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