OpenAI Grows Revenue to $20B in Two Years, Says CFO

OpenAI’s Chief Financial Officer (CFO), Sarah Friar, recently outlined how the company’s revenue growth was driven by a business model that ties financial success directly to the value delivered by its AI products.

According to the CFO’s blog post, OpenAI’s yearly revenue run rate surpassed $20 billion in 2025, up from about $6 billion in 2024 and $2 billion in 2023, which is roughly 10 times increase in two years.

At the center of this growth is what Friar describes as a compute-led revenue flywheel. “As we scale compute, we can train more capable models; more capable models drive more usage; more usage drives more revenue; and more revenue lets us invest in even more compute,” she wrote. This cycle explains why revenue growth closely tracked OpenAI’s expansion in available compute.

OpenAI’s compute capacity (measured in gigawatts of processing power) expanded at roughly three times year-over-year, growing from about 0.2 gigawatts in 2023 to 0.6 GW in 2024, and reaching close to 1.9 GW in 2025. Over the same period, annualized revenue grew three times per year as well, that is from $2 billion to $6 billion to over $20 billion. Friar emphasized that this is not coincidental: “Our ability to serve customers, measured in revenue, scales directly with the amount of compute we can reliably deploy.”

Monetization Strategy

The company first generated revenue through paid consumer subscriptions for ChatGPT, then expanded to workplace and enterprise plans with security and administrative controls. It also earns from developers and enterprises through usage-based API pricing, where customers pay based on how much the AI is used to perform real tasks. More recently, OpenAI introduced a free tier supported by advertising and commerce, allowing it to monetize high user volumes without charging upfront. Across all these layers, revenue increases as customers work with the AI, ensuring that costs and earnings scale together with actual usage.

OpenAI’s earnings surge in 2025 was not accidental, it said. It resulted from a deliberate model where compute expansion enabled product improvements, which drove adoption and monetization, and generated revenue that funded further growth. This loop, according to the CFO, defines how OpenAI scales its business with the increasing value of intelligence.