According to estimates, OpenAI needs at least 200 billion dollars in additional external capital to continue paying its cloud bills until 2030.
It’s well known that ChatGPT is a money-consuming machine, but how deep OpenAI’s financial hole is remains a secret. As a private company, OpenAI does not disclose its financial details. The British banking group HSBC ventured a prediction and concluded that OpenAI still faces a gap of 207 billion dollars to cover its costs.
High Cloud Bills
Financial Times delves deeper into the analysis, starting with the cost side. OpenAI must continuously purchase additional data center capacity to keep ChatGPT running 24/7. The main provider for OpenAI is Microsoft, with whom a renewed deal worth 250 billion dollars was recently made. OpenAI also recently approached AWS for another 38 billion dollars.
The cumulative value of these two deals is expected to reach 1.8 trillion dollars by 2030, according to HSBC’s calculations. This amounts to a hefty annual cloud bill of approximately 620 billion dollars. HSBC notes that by 2030, only a third of the contracted capacity of 36 gigawatts will actually be in use.
Rising Revenues, Increasing Competition
Next, it is examined whether the revenues are high enough to continue covering the rising costs. OpenAI generated approximately 4.3 billion dollars in the first half of 2025. This puts it on track for about eight billion dollars in revenue for this year. These revenues mainly come from paid subscriptions.
These will remain the primary source of income through 2030, predicts HSBC. The banking group forecasts that more and more users will pay to use ChatGPT, increasing from five percent now to at least ten percent by 2030. Eventually, an AI subscription will become ‘as common as a Microsoft 365 subscription,’ according to HSBC. Advertisements can provide additional income.
OpenAI will have to share the pie with competitors. Although ChatGPT is expected to reach about 3 billion by 2030, competitors like Anthropic and xAI will nibble at OpenAI’s market share. This could drop from 71 percent to 56 percent by 2030. Notably, Google Gemini is not included in the calculation.
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Adding it all up, HSBC expects the consumer market to generate 129 billion dollars for OpenAI. Enterprise clients will bring in approximately 386 billion dollars per year. Every additional five hundred million users could add 36 billion dollars, and twenty percent paying subscribers could increase revenues by 194 billion dollars.
Looking for Extra Cash
The current and projected revenues of OpenAI do not nearly cover the costs. The cumulative cash flow is expected to be about 282 billion dollars by 2030: money that OpenAI has to pay its bills. The company can expect
But even then, HSBC arrives at a shortfall of 207 billion dollars, including a reserve buffer of 10 billion dollars. OpenAI will have to obtain this from its investors. Microsoft and Japan’s Softbank are currently the company’s main investors.
HSBC’s analysis is based on a lot of guesswork and speculation, but it illustrates how complex OpenAI’s financial model is. In short, the company spends much more than it earns. As long as the AI hype continues, OpenAI will stay afloat, but it must hope that the bubble doesn’t burst.