OpenAI expects to burn through $278 billion in free cash flow between 2026 and 2030, highlighting the extraordinary cost of building the computing infrastructure required to compete at the frontier of artificial intelligence.
The projections were contained in a private company presentation prepared in July and reviewed by the Financial Times, according to reports from the FT and Reuters. OpenAI expects spending on computing power and infrastructure to reach approximately $856 billion by the end of the decade.
The enormous spending commitment comes despite expectations for explosive revenue growth. OpenAI projects annual revenue will rise from approximately $36 billion in 2026 to $350 billion in 2030, while cumulative revenue over the five-year period is expected to reach about $840 billion.
OpenAI’s Computing Bill Approaches $1 Trillion
Computing infrastructure is expected to remain OpenAI’s largest expense as the company develops increasingly sophisticated AI models and serves a rapidly expanding customer base.
The company forecasts roughly $856 billion in cumulative spending on computing power and infrastructure through 2030, according to the Financial Times.
That spending includes the enormous quantities of AI accelerators, data-center capacity, electricity and networking infrastructure required to train and operate frontier models.
The numbers illustrate a defining challenge for the AI industry: revenue is growing extraordinarily quickly, but the capital required to remain competitive is growing alongside it.
OpenAI expects revenue to increase almost tenfold between 2026 and 2030. Yet even that growth is not projected to generate positive free cash flow over the period.
Instead, the company forecasts cumulative negative free cash flow of approximately $278 billion.
Revenue Could Reach $350 Billion by 2030
OpenAI’s projections assume that demand for artificial intelligence continues expanding rapidly across consumers and businesses.
Revenue is expected to reach $350 billion annually by 2030, compared with $36 billion projected for 2026.
If achieved, that would place OpenAI among the world’s largest technology businesses by revenue.
The company is betting that increasingly capable AI systems will become embedded across software development, research, enterprise productivity and other industries, creating an enormous market for its models and applications.
But reaching that scale requires OpenAI to secure computing capacity years before all of the associated revenue materializes.
That creates a financing challenge rarely seen even among high-growth technology companies.
OpenAI Faces Enormous Funding Requirements
The projections help explain why raising capital remains central to OpenAI’s strategy.
The company raised $122 billion in March at an $852 billion valuation, according to the Financial Times. Despite that enormous capital injection, the FT reported that OpenAI could exhaust those funds by 2028 under its current spending projections.
OpenAI has also held discussions with investors about another funding round that could value the company at approximately $1.2 trillion ahead of a potential future public listing.
Its financing requirements have implications beyond OpenAI itself.
Companies supplying the chips, cloud infrastructure and data-center capacity needed for its expansion increasingly depend on AI laboratories maintaining access to enormous pools of capital.
OpenAI’s growth plans therefore represent not only a bet on future demand for ChatGPT and its AI models, but also a major component of the broader infrastructure investment cycle supporting the AI boom.
AI Growth Comes With an Extraordinary Price Tag
The projections show just how unusual the economics of frontier AI have become.
A conventional technology company approaching hundreds of billions of dollars in annual revenue might normally be expected to generate substantial free cash flow.
OpenAI instead expects to consume hundreds of billions of dollars while simultaneously growing toward that scale.
Whether the strategy ultimately works will depend on several factors: how quickly AI revenue continues growing, whether computing costs decline, how efficiently new models can be trained and operated, and whether OpenAI can continue raising capital on attractive terms.
For now, the company’s internal projections suggest that the race to build increasingly powerful AI will remain extraordinarily capital intensive through the end of the decade.
OpenAI may generate hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue along the way, but according to its own forecasts reported by the Financial Times, building the infrastructure behind that growth could cost even more.
