OpenAI needs to raise at least $207B by 2030 so it can continue to lose money
106 comments
·November 26, 2025matthewowen
postexitus
Tapping into AdTech is extremely hard, as it's hard driven by network effects. What you mean is "displaying ads inside OpenAI products" then, yes, achievable, but that's a miniscule part of targeted Ad markets - 2% is actually very optimistic. Otherwise, they can sell literally 0 products to existing players as they all have already established "AI" toolsets to help them for ad generation and targeting.
friendzis
Query: LibraGPT, create a plan for my trip to Italia
Response: Book a car at <totally not an ad> and it will be waiting for you at arrival terminal, drive to Napoli and stay at <totally not an ad> with an amazing view. There's an amazing <totally not an ad> place that serves grandma's favorite carbonara! Do you want me to make the bookings with a totally not fake 20% discount?
disgruntledphd2
> It also estimates that LLM companies will capture 2% of the digital advertising market, which seems kind of low to me. There will be challenges in capturing it and challenges with user trust, but it seems super promising because it will likely be harder to block and has a lot of intent context that should make it like search advertising++. And for context, search advertising is 40% of digital ad revenue.
Yeah, I don't like that estimate. It's either way too low, or much too high. Like, I've seen no sign of OpenAI building an ads team or product, which they'd need to do soon if it's going to contribute meaningful revenue by 2030.
_aavaa_
https://openai.com/careers/growth-paid-marketing-platform-en...
Is that role not exactly what you mention?
xixixao
At least the description is not at all about building an adtech platform inside OpenAI, it's about optimizing their marketing spend (which being a big brand, makes sense).
There are a bunch of people from FB at OpenAI, so they could staff an adtech team internally I think, but I also think they might not be looking at ads yet, with having "higher" ambitions (at least not the typical ads machine ala FB/Google). Also if they really needed to monetize, I bet they could wire up Meta ads platform to buy on ChatGPT, saving themselves a decade of building a solid buying platform for marketers.
dotandgtfo
That's a marketing role, not a product role.
disgruntledphd2
Actually yes (I did mean to check again but I hadn't seen evidence of this before).
I do think that this seems odd, looks like they're hiring an IC to build some of this stuff, which seems odd as I would have expected them to be hiring multiple teams.
That being said, the earliest they could start making decent money from this is 2028, and if we don't see them hire a real sales team by next March then it's more likely to be 2030 or so.
jcfrei
There's also a possible scenario where the online ads market around search engines gets completely disrupted and the only remaining avenues for ad spending are around content delivery systems (social media, youtube, streaming, webpages, etc.). All other discovery happens within chatbots and they just get a revenue share whenever a chatbot refers a user to a particular product. I think ChatGPT is soon going to roll out this feature where you can do walmart shopping without leaving the chat.
rchaud
Google, Meta and Microsoft have AI search as well, so OAI with no ad product or real time bidding platform isn't going to just walk in and take their market.
2% is optimistic in my opinion.
fhd2
Google, Meta and Microsoft would have to compete on demand, i.e. users of the chat product. Not saying they won't manage, but I don't think the competition is about ad tech infrastructure as much as it is about eyeballs.
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jack_pp
> And for context, search advertising is 40% of digital ad revenue.
But all the search companies have their own AI so how would OAI make money in this sector?
aurareturn
The team also assumes LLM companies will capture 2 per cent of the digital advertising market in revenue, from slightly more than zero currently.
I think people are severely underestimating ChatGPT as a way to make money other than subscriptions. I also think people are underestimating the branding power ChatGPT has already. All my friends have ChatGPT on their phone. None of them except me has Gemini or Claude app.
This doesn't account for OpenAI's other ambitions such as Sora app.
Hey Sam Altman or OpenAI employee, if you are reading this, I think you should buy the North American version of TikTok if the opportunity presents itself. The future of short videos will be heavily AI generated/assisted. Combine Tiktok's audience with your Sora tools and ChatGPT data and you got yourself a true Instagram competitor immediately. If the $14b sales price of US Tiktok is real, that's an absolute bargain in the grand scheme of things.
gtirloni
> Meta has 3.5 billion users and projected ~$200b revenue in 2025.
Meta has WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook to account for that.
OpenAI has ChatGPT (not a social platform).
It seems to me you're comparing apples and oranges here.
aurareturn
OpenAI has ChatGPT (not a social platform).
Anyways, check this out: https://openai.com/index/group-chats-in-chatgpt/
It seems to me you're comparing apples and oranges here.
PS. That's why Meta and Google are all in on AI. OpenAI is an existential threat to both in my humble opinion.
k_kelly
Google makes over a billion of its ad Revenue from search. Intent works.
But I think Open AI is not a slam dunk for Ads. Gemini and AI mode will compete for the same budget, and Google's Ad machine is polished.
I think eventually you will buy Ads for Open AI in Google's marketing platforms, just like most people buy bing ads in Google.
aurareturn
OpenAI knows my intent better than Google.
I'm telling it nearly everything from my work problems to health problems to love life problems to product research, traveling plans, etc.
l2silver
I wonder if meta is a poor comparison for advertising because they're users tend to spend more time on their products doom scrolling, as opposed to something like google, where you get your answer right away and move on.
aurareturn
ChatGPT is a hybrid between Google and Meta. People use it for product and service search and research. People also use it as a companion - especially young people.
It's becoming social as well: https://openai.com/index/group-chats-in-chatgpt/
pjmlp
What about the usual capitalism point of view?
If their business isn't sustainable they should go bankrupt, and close shop.
ChicagoDave
TechCrunch: Anthropic is projecting positive cash flow by 2028, while OpenAI is expecting sizable losses, with cash burn reaching $14 billion in 2026
ZiiS
Raising $207B is plausible vs the dozens of Nuclear Power plants they also need.
darkwizard42
Is there any link directly to the report? I am unable to find any in this article or a number of others which seem to just copy the same information here.
I think beyond the number of crazy assumptions (no Google taking market share in the consumer market?? only 2% of digital advertising expected to be captured by OpenAI?) it is hard to nail down which levers could move which might make this funding hole disappear.
voxadam
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054092 | 11 hours ago | 44 points | 19 comments
ripped_britches
I heard this about Amazon for 20 years
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nasmorn
Amazon raised like 10million. People complained about lack of dividends but that was at least money earned
zerosizedweasle
Amazon wasn't committing to larger spending in one year than the US defense budget.
bill3389
It is not losing money, the whole industry haven't figured out how to generate revenue yet. it is the starting phase of LLM like we experienced in .com bubble. Is it a bubble at this point? Yes. Can it generate revenue in the future? Yes. Will openAI survive in this bubble? Maybe.
tantalor
> as ubiquitous and useful as Microsoft 365
What is this saying? Is this sarcastic?
I don't know anybody with a Microsoft 365 subscription.
I suppose the cloud storage is nice, but you can do much better; Google gives you double that for the same price ($99/yr).
zerosizedweasle
Businesses, a lot of people have it through work.
rapsey
The most interesting point about OpenAI I have heard lately is they are literally trying to make themselves too big to fail. If they go down so does everyone else, which explains all those strange deals with everybody and the comment from their (cfo?) about being backstopped by the gov.
akira_067
This seems accurate, and plausibly the only way out. The biggest issue I see here is that in this case... the greed might topple a government
rvnx
If OpenAI fails, they could potentially bring in their downfall the major cloud providers who invested in hardware for them, expecting that it would pay-off over time.
maherbeg
I don't see a world where there is such a catastrophic failure, unless someone comes up with a significantly more efficient architecture.
We're barely scratching the surface of the utility of LLMs with today's models. They aren't more pervasive because of their costs today, but what happens if they drop another order of magnitude with the current capabilities?
lkey
Only Oracle went into debt to fund this expansion, and may well die. The rest of the cloud oriented mag7 used cash, can afford to write it off, and will continue being monopolies unimpeded.
ZiiS
'Potentially' but we are nowhere close to this. Hyperscalers print a _lot_ of money they can afford to lose. Even Nvidia wouldn't be in too much trouble yet. (The pure LLM companies are already toast, IMHO).
franktankbank
Oh no not the Cloud!
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YetAnotherNick
> If they go down so does everyone else
What does that even mean?
rvnx
Let's say OpenAI signed a commitment contract that they agreed to spend XXX USD in your company over N years. You invest in infrastructure, your contractors sometimes take loans, the construction companies take loans. Countries / Funds lend money to such companies (example: Saudi Arabia fund), these funds themselves raised debt, it can quickly spiral down.
bradfa
If OpenAI fails, wouldn't their customers just move to other AI providers? So the total hardware demand by AI companies wouldn't dramatically change over a reasonable time frame?
MattDamonSpace
Similar to certain banks in 2007/2008, the idea would be “so much investment is tied to one company that if that company went bankrupt, it could have consequences for the broader economy”
rcarr
The thing is, it is not 2007/2008 any more. The US government is holding record amounts of debt and countries around the world are now trying to become independent of it. This includes its bond markets on which the dollar relies upon to give it its reserve currency status, which in turn is what gives it its power to print money and bail industries out. If something happens that requires Big Tech to be bailed out and international bond holders decide the US is no longer reliable, it could very well end up triggering the collapse of the US dollar as the world's reserve currency and the downfall of the US as we know it.
jvanderbot
Is it unclear? Compared to other times a "too big to fail" industry failed?
If OpenAI crashes, for example funding stops, they go broke, fall behind, nobody buys anything, then all the money they invested for data centers or demand they created for NVIDIA chips and compute collapses. That creates surplus of hardware, causes lots of construction/buildout / stockup orders to get cancelled, and the whole thing ripples as suppliers and construction and data center providers etc etc suddenly lose a ton of anticipated profits.
Share prices drop as people dump to protect their portfolios, anticipating dips in the prices because share prices will drop as people dump to protect their portfolios (I'm not kidding).
Given that the big 7 AI companies are basically _all_ of the market growth lately, it doesn't even take a serious panic / paranoia episode to see the market itself stagnate or significantly regress, as people pull from anything AI related, and then pull from the market itself anticipating the market will fall.
It's a fairly standard playbook at this point.
rapsey
In terms of the stock market since without AI thw US would be in a recession.
It's sort of hard to judge this.
The article mostly focuses on ChatGPT uses, but hard to say if ChatGPT is going to be the main revenue driver. It could be! Also unclear if the underlying report is underconsidering the other products.
It also estimates that LLM companies will capture 2% of the digital advertising market, which seems kind of low to me. There will be challenges in capturing it and challenges with user trust, but it seems super promising because it will likely be harder to block and has a lot of intent context that should make it like search advertising++. And for context, search advertising is 40% of digital ad revenue.
Seems like the error bars have to be pretty big on these estimates.