OpenAI sells ChatGPT subscriptions to consumers and businesses, gives developers access to its models through APIs and offers Codex for software work. The cost of serving those products at global scale is set to stay ahead of the cash they produce: Reuters, citing a Financial Times report based on a company presentation, said OpenAI projects $278 billion of negative free cash flow from 2026 through 2030.
A customer can ask ChatGPT to analyze information or complete a task, while a business can connect the service to company files and tools. Codex takes a software request, inspects a codebase, makes changes and runs tests. Each workflow depends on computing capacity not only to train the underlying models but also to run them whenever a user or application asks for an answer.
The reported July presentation projected 2026 revenue of $36 billion and 2030 revenue of $350 billion, with cumulative sales of $840 billion through the period. It also put spending on computing power and infrastructure at roughly $856 billion. In other words, even a nearly tenfold increase in annual revenue would not make the expansion self-funding within the forecast window.
OpenAI’s March financing announcement shows why the bill is so large. The company said ChatGPT had more than 900 million weekly users, its APIs were processing more than 15 billion tokens a minute and Codex had more than 2 million weekly users. It also said enterprise products already accounted for more than 40% of revenue, making workplaces a material part of the business rather than a side bet.
That growth runs in both directions. More subscribers, workplace seats and developer activity can increase revenue, but they also create more model requests that must be served. OpenAI says it is spreading that load across cloud providers, chip platforms and data-center partners while trying to lower delivery costs through improved hardware and algorithms.
OpenAI closed $122 billion of committed capital at an $852 billion post-money valuation in March. The Financial Times report said the company is on track to exhaust that cash by 2028, two years before the end of the forecast period. The figures remain internal projections rather than realized results, and Reuters said OpenAI could not immediately be reached for comment.