OpenAI’s Revenue Continues to Soar as It Looks to Raise $30 Billion in New Funding
OpenAI's ARR is about $50B by its accounting, while $70B uses comparable methods; it seeks $30B funding at $1.4T amid IPO uncertainty.
Key Takeaways
- OpenAI’s annualized revenue was reported at roughly $50B as of late September, while a prior ~$70B figure differed because of how partner sales through cloud providers are counted, not a simple data error.
- Growth was driven by enterprise adoption, ChatGPT usage, Codex, and aggressive pricing against rivals, with third-quarter ARR up about 77% and enterprise revenue up 107%.
- The revised revenue figure rattled tech and chip markets, highlighting investor sensitivity to OpenAI and Anthropic’s financial signals as both weigh IPO timing and competition.
- OpenAI is seeking at least $30B in new funding at a $1.4T pre-money valuation and expects to reach at least $70B annualized revenue by the end of 2026.
- The key challenge is whether revenue can grow fast enough to fund massive data center and compute commitments, likely depending on demonstrable productivity gains.
Meta description: OpenAI's annualized revenue rate was roughly $50 billion at end of September, while earlier $70 billion estimates reflected different partner sales accounting.
Tags: OpenAI, Anthropic, AI revenue, ARR, IPO
OpenAI Annualized Revenue Rate: $50 Billion and $70 Billion Gap
OpenAI's annualized revenue rate has been reported as roughly $50 billion at the end of September and nearly $70 billion in a September 29 report, a difference that matters for investors, chip markets and the broader AI bubble debate. The two figures are not a simple data error. They reflect different ways of counting sales made through cloud partners, according to Financial Times, Axios and Bloomberg reporting.
Q3 Growth Sets the Baseline
Before the accounting clarification, OpenAI had been pointing to rapid growth. Axios first reported that OpenAI was nearing a $70 billion annualized revenue rate, up about 70 percent since the start of the third quarter. The ARR metric projects current monthly revenue over a full year. At DevDay, OpenAI said ChatGPT reached more than 1.2 billion people every week, with over 35 million weekly ChatGPT Work and Codex users and 2.5 million businesses using OpenAI products.
The main driver was an expanding enterprise business. Growth was tied to enterprise sales and an aggressive price war against Claude and Chinese models, a strategy it reinforced with the just-launched GPT-6.1-Sol. The Codex coding assistant was also growing quickly, helped by popularity of the GPT-6 model family. CNBC reported overall annualized revenue grew 77 percent in the third quarter and enterprise revenue jumped 107 percent. Anthropic, by contrast, had reportedly passed $65 billion in July and may now match or exceed OpenAI's rate, while preparing an IPO as early as November.
The $50 Billion and $70 Billion Gap
The Financial Times update on October 9, 2026, set a different end-of-September figure: OpenAI's annualized revenue rate stood at roughly $50 billion. Axios said the previously reported nearly $70 billion figure was based on a calculation designed to make OpenAI's revenue more comparable to Anthropic's.
The gap comes down to partner-sales accounting. Anthropic records the full customer payment when selling through cloud partners and then logs the cloud provider's cut as an expense. OpenAI counts only its own share as revenue for certain partner deals. Axios reported that both methods comply with US GAAP standards. The distinction depends on each company's role in the transaction, including who controls the customer relationship and who is responsible for delivering the product.
Accounting Differences and Market Reaction
The revised figure moved markets. After the Financial Times report landed, tech stocks took a hit, with chip stocks dropping several percent. The selloff showed how sensitive investors have become to the financial signals from the two biggest US AI companies. That nervousness may also help explain why Anthropic is moving cautiously on its IPO and why OpenAI has already pushed its own public offering to next year.
Sam Altman recently blamed the IPO delay on safety risks, but the postponement was already in the works well before the cybersecurity incidents of recent months. Reports surfaced in April that OpenAI had missed internal growth targets.
The higher figure remains part of OpenAI's forward-looking estimate. Bloomberg reported that the company expects to actually hit an annualized revenue rate of at least $70 billion by the end of 2026, a figure shared during talks about a new funding round. OpenAI is negotiating at least $30 billion in new capital at a target pre-money valuation of $1.4 trillion. In March, it raised up to $122 billion at a post-money valuation of $852 billion.
The central question remains whether revenue can grow fast enough to cover massive data center bills and long-term spending commitments on compute buildouts. That will likely hinge on measurable productivity gains that companies can actually point to.
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