OpenAI just hit $10 billion in annual revenue. In under 3 years.

That's faster than Facebook. Faster than Google.

And it the fastest-growing enterprise software business in history.

But the math is brutal.

They spent $9 billion to generate $4 billion in revenue last year.

They lost $5 billion.

Compute costs alone were $5 billion – more than their entire revenue.

Every free user is a loss.

But their numbers are growing fast:

500 million weekly users (5% of the planet)

3 million paying business customers (up 50% in 4 months)

90%+ of users still on the free tier

OpenAI has 80% of generative AI traffic (similarweb)

and they want to hit $125B in revenue in 2029 – and break even.

That's a 13x from current revenues.

And it would make them bigger than Meta. Half the size of Google.

Let's say:

500M --> 2B users (similar to facebook)

90% users on free tier

3M--> 30M business users with $500/month

That's $228B.

Ambitious? Yes.

Impossible? No.

Drivers:

AI agents

Subscriptions

API revenue

New revenue streams (affiliate, advertising, etc.)

Right now, OpenAI is valued at 30× revenue ($300B valuation).

Compare that to:

Google: 6× revenue

Microsoft: 13× revenue

Even NVIDIA: 25× revenue

Investors are betting OpenAI will become the Amazon of AI.

What's your take?