Sam Altman Forecasts $20B Revenue in 2025, $100B by 2030

OpenAI is making money faster than almost anyone expected. CEO Sam Altman announced that the company will cross $20 billion in yearly revenue by the end of 2025. That’s a massive jump from where they were just a few months ago. Back in September, OpenAI’s CFO said they were on track for $13 billion this year. Now Altman is saying the real number is much higher than that.

To put this in perspective, OpenAI only made about $1.3 billion in revenue in 2023. Going from that to $20 billion in just two years is the kind of growth that makes investors get very excited and very nervous at the same time. The company behind ChatGPT has become one of the fastest growing businesses in history, and the numbers keep climbing.

Altman didn’t just stop at talking about this year. He said OpenAI expects to reach hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue by 2030. Some reports suggest the company is actually aiming for $100 billion by 2029. That would make OpenAI bigger than most traditional tech companies in terms of yearly sales. For a startup that only really started making serious money three years ago when ChatGPT launched, these projections sound almost unbelievable.

The announcement came in a long post on X where Altman was responding to questions about how OpenAI plans to pay for all the infrastructure it’s building. The company has signed about $1.4 trillion worth of deals over the next eight years to build data centers and buy computing power. That’s an enormous amount of money to commit to spending, especially when you’re not even profitable yet.

OpenAI is still losing billions of dollars despite bringing in all this revenue. Microsoft’s recent quarterly report included a charge that suggests OpenAI lost around $12 billion in just one quarter. The company is spending money on computing power, staff salaries, research, and infrastructure faster than it can make money back. Altman has said he doesn’t expect OpenAI to become profitable until 2029 at the earliest.

So how does a company that’s losing billions plan to spend trillions? Altman says the money will come from continued revenue growth, selling more shares to investors, taking out loans, and a new idea of selling computing power directly to other companies. OpenAI wants to become what they’re calling an AI cloud provider, basically renting out their powerful computers to businesses that need them.

The timing of Altman’s announcement was interesting because it came right after some confusion about whether OpenAI wanted government help. The company’s CFO Sarah Friar had made comments at an event suggesting that OpenAI might need some kind of federal backstop or guarantee to help finance all these investments. That caused a lot of controversy because people started worrying that OpenAI was becoming too big to fail and would expect taxpayers to bail them out if things went wrong.

Altman quickly shut that down. He posted that OpenAI does not have and does not want government guarantees for their data centers. He said if the company screws up and can’t fix its mistakes, it should fail and let other companies take over. That’s how capitalism is supposed to work according to him. David Sacks, who advises President Trump on AI issues, also said there would be no federal bailout for AI companies.

The whole situation revealed how much pressure OpenAI is under to justify the enormous amounts of money being poured into AI infrastructure. Everyone from tech giants like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to smaller companies is spending hundreds of billions on AI. There are serious questions about whether all this spending will actually pay off or if we’re watching another tech bubble inflate.

Altman argues that OpenAI needs to invest at this massive scale right now because building infrastructure takes years. If they wait until they need it, it will be too late. The company is already running into limits with computing power. They’ve had to hold back new features and delay rolling out new models because they don’t have enough capacity to handle current demand. Based on what Altman is seeing with how fast AI is growing, he thinks not having enough computing power is a bigger risk than having too much.

The revenue growth plan includes several different business areas. ChatGPT will continue to be a major source of income as more people and businesses pay for subscriptions. OpenAI already has more than one million business customers, which is impressive for a company that only started seriously selling to enterprises recently. The consumer side is also growing as people pay for ChatGPT Plus and other premium features.

Beyond ChatGPT, OpenAI is getting into hardware. The company acquired a design firm run by Jony Ive, the person who designed the iPhone, and they’re reportedly working on some kind of AI device. Details are limited, but there’s talk of a palm sized gadget that uses AI in new ways. If OpenAI can create hardware that people want to buy, that opens up an entirely new revenue stream.

Robotics is another area Altman mentioned. OpenAI has been doing research on robots for years, and now they’re looking at how to turn that into actual products people can purchase. The company believes AI will eventually power robots that can do useful work in homes, offices, and factories. Getting into that market early could be huge if robots actually take off the way some people predict.

The AI cloud idea is particularly ambitious. Right now, if a company wants powerful computing for AI, they go to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. OpenAI wants to be another option on that list. They would rent out computing power to other businesses, competing directly with their own investor Microsoft. That’s a bold move considering Microsoft has put billions into OpenAI and provides a lot of their current computing infrastructure.

Altman also mentioned that AI could automate scientific research and create huge value in areas like medicine. This is one of the big promises of advanced AI that it will help discover new drugs, solve complex problems, and accelerate research that normally takes years. If that happens and OpenAI is at the center of it, the financial rewards would be enormous. But that’s still mostly speculation at this point. There’s no clear evidence yet that AI can deliver the kind of scientific breakthroughs everyone is hoping for.

The company is valued at $500 billion right now, which makes it one of the most valuable startups ever. That valuation is based on the belief that OpenAI will dominate the AI industry and turn into a massive profitable company within a few years. Investors are betting that ChatGPT is just the beginning and that OpenAI will create products and services that become essential to how businesses operate and how people live.

Not everyone is convinced this will work out. Some investors and analysts think the AI industry is spending money recklessly and that a crash is coming. They compare it to the dot com bubble in the early 2000s when internet companies spent wildly on growth and then collapsed when they couldn’t make enough money to justify their valuations. The fact that OpenAI is projecting such huge revenue growth while still losing billions makes some people uncomfortable.

Altman seems confident though. In the podcast where he first talked about revenue being higher than reported, he sounded almost annoyed that people were questioning OpenAI’s financial plans. He said revenue is growing steeply and he expects it to keep growing. When asked about critics who doubt the company, Altman said he would love for OpenAI to go public just so short sellers could bet against them and then lose their money when the stock goes up.

The tension between massive spending and uncertain profits is something every AI company is dealing with right now. The technology is advancing quickly, but nobody knows for sure how much money there is to be made from it. Companies are racing to build infrastructure and develop products before their competitors do, even if that means operating at huge losses for years.

For OpenAI specifically, the pressure is intense because they’re seen as the leader in AI. ChatGPT was the product that made AI mainstream and showed people what was possible. The company has to maintain that leadership position while also figuring out how to become a sustainable business. If they succeed, the $20 billion in revenue this year and hundreds of billions by 2030 will seem like just the beginning. If they fail, it will be one of the most spectacular collapses in tech history.

Altman’s announcement makes it clear that OpenAI is all in on growing as fast as possible. The company is not taking a cautious approach or trying to become profitable before expanding. They’re betting everything on AI becoming as important to the economy as electricity or the internet. Whether that bet pays off is something we’ll only know years from now when we can look back and see if the revenue actually materialized and if all those trillions in infrastructure spending were worth it.

Right now, OpenAI is in a strange position. They’re making more money than almost any startup in history, but they’re also losing money faster than almost anyone. They’re valued at half a trillion dollars, but they don’t own most of their own computing infrastructure and depend heavily on partners like Microsoft. They’re promising to revolutionize entire industries, but their main product is still basically a very smart chatbot that sometimes makes mistakes.

The $20 billion revenue number for 2025 is impressive no matter how you look at it. Very few companies ever reach that level of yearly sales, and doing it this quickly is remarkable. But impressive numbers don’t guarantee success. OpenAI needs to prove they can turn revenue into profit, that demand for AI will keep growing, and that they can stay ahead of competitors who are also spending billions to catch up. The next few years will determine whether Sam Altman’s optimistic predictions come true or if OpenAI becomes a cautionary tale about growing too fast and spending too much.