OpenAI is generating revenue at a rate no technology company has matched this quickly. It is also burning money at a pace that is making its own CFO nervous enough to push back against its CEO’s IPO timeline. Both things are true simultaneously, and understanding the tension between them is now one of the more important questions in tech finance.
The company crossed $25 billion in annualized revenue at the end of February 2026, according to reporting by The Information. That’s up from $21.4 billion at year-end 2025 and roughly $6 billion in late 2024 — a trajectory that took roughly 39 months from near-zero. For comparison, Google needed more than five years to reach $25 billion in annual revenue after its 2004 IPO. Salesforce took a decade.
The Other Side of the Ledger
The revenue story is real. The cost story is equally real. OpenAI is projected to lose $14 billion in 2026, according to internal financial projections reviewed by The Information. The company’s cash burn is expected to reach $57 billion annually by 2027, with breakeven not anticipated until 2030. OpenAI has made public commitments to spend $600 billion over five years on infrastructure, data centers, and compute.
That financial picture has created a visible fault line at the executive level. CEO Sam Altman has privately told associates he wants to take OpenAI public as soon as Q4 2026. CFO Sarah Friar disagrees. She has raised concerns about what she describes as the pace of spending commitments and the difficulty of presenting a credible path to profitability to public market investors. According to reports, Altman has since excluded Friar from key financial planning meetings, and she no longer reports to him directly.
Valuation vs. Reality
OpenAI’s current private valuation stands at approximately $850 billion, following a $110 billion funding round in February 2026 — the largest private technology financing in history. Altman has indicated an IPO target of $1 trillion.
Whether public markets will accept that valuation given the losses depends on how investors frame the story. The optimistic read: OpenAI is building foundational AI infrastructure that will generate massive returns at scale, and early losses are an investment, not a warning sign. The skeptical read: a company burning $57 billion a year by 2027 needs extraordinary revenue growth just to stay solvent, and the competitive pressure from Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and open-source models is intensifying.
Anthropic, for its part, is approaching $19 billion in annualized revenue following its $30 billion Series G raise in March 2026 at a $380 billion valuation — a gap that has narrowed considerably from twelve months ago.
What This Means for the Market
If OpenAI does list in late 2026 or 2027, it would be one of the largest technology IPOs in history, rivaling only SpaceX — which filed its own confidential S-1 this month. The back-to-back potential listings of the two most-watched private companies in tech represent a significant test of how public markets price AI infrastructure in an era of enormous capital deployment and uncertain near-term profitability.
The internal split between Altman and Friar may resolve itself, or it may not. What it signals clearly is that even inside the company widely regarded as setting the pace of the AI race, the financial math of doing so is contested territory.
Sources: The Information — OpenAI tops $25B annualized revenue · WinBuzzer — OpenAI CEO CFO IPO split · The Information — OpenAI losses tripling $14B
