Eseandre Mordi
⬤ OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar broke down how the company built a business that scales directly with AI capability. ChatGPT's evolved way beyond its research preview origins—it's now infrastructure that people and companies rely on for thinking, planning, and getting work done. This shift marks OpenAI's move from lab experiments to real-world deployment at massive scale.
⬤ The numbers tell a striking story: annualized recurring revenue shot up from roughly $2 billion in 2023 to over $20 billion projected for 2025. During that same window, computing capacity exploded from about 0.2 gigawatts to nearly 1.9 gigawatts—a near 10x jump. Both metrics climbed along nearly identical curves, with compute scaling roughly 3x annually and revenue keeping pace.
⬤ OpenAI says this tight correlation proves something important—demand for smarter AI translates straight into infrastructure needs. As ChatGPT adoption took off with consumers and enterprises, heavier model usage demanded serious compute expansion. The company frames this as proof their revenue scales with actual value delivered, not just arbitrary growth.
⬤ For 2026, OpenAI's shifting focus from pure scaling to practical adoption. They're targeting healthcare, scientific research, and enterprise applications where better intelligence creates measurable real-world impact. It's a signal they're ready to dig deeper into applied use cases as their AI platforms mature.
Eseandre Mordi
