OpenAI is expected to burn over $278 billion in cash by 2030, with a revenue target of $350 billion over the same period.

OpenAI is seeking to complete a new round of financing at a higher valuation, while disclosing that its free cash flow will be deeply negative over the next five years, highlighting significant long-term funding pressure.

On September 18, according to the UK’s Financial Times citing a recent presentation it obtained, OpenAI is projected to generate up to $278 billion in negative free cash flow over the next five years, primarily for large-scale expansion of computing power and infrastructure.

OpenAI expects revenue to reach $350 billion by 2030, up from an estimated $36 billion in 2026. This represents nearly a tenfold increase in six years, with cumulative revenue from 2026 to 2030 totaling about $840 billion.

Meanwhile, the parent company of ChatGPT is negotiating a new round of financing with investors, and a potential valuation of $1.2 trillion has been mentioned. Insiders close to the company have revealed that OpenAI is pushing to complete the deal at an even higher valuation.

This plan means that OpenAI will continue to rely heavily on external capital in the coming years. After raising $122 billion in March this year, and given its current burn rate, the company is expected to exhaust these funds as early as 2028, posing a direct challenge to its existing financial arrangements and hardware procurement contracts.

OpenAI’s revenue outlook is not without highlights. The documents indicate that its revenue is expected to rise from $36 billion this year to $350 billion by 2030.

In July, with the launch of new models, OpenAI’s annualized revenue grew by about 20% month-on-month.

It is worth noting that early forecasts in May this year projected a five-year free cash flow gap as high as $305 billion, but this has since narrowed, reflecting, to some extent, better-than-expected commercialization progress.

Nevertheless, OpenAI’s expenditures far outpace its revenue growth. Documents estimate that spending on computing power and infrastructure alone will total about $856 billion by 2030, making it the company’s single largest expense item.

While OpenAI is seeing revenue growth, it also faces increasingly fierce market competition.

To compete for enterprise clients, the company has significantly slashed product prices, not only contending for market share with U.S. rival Anthropic, but also dealing with challenges from low-cost “open weight” models. This price war compresses profit margins and further increases dependence on external financing.

OpenAI’s funding situation ripples across a vast industrial chain.

According to the Financial Times, major tech groups such as NVIDIA, Oracle, and SoftBank’s data center business have, to a significant extent, pinned their future revenues on contracts with OpenAI.

If OpenAI’s financing pace were to slow, related companies’ performance expectations would likewise come under pressure.

On the capital markets front, OpenAI previously planned to go public this autumn, and had secretly filed for an IPO with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in June, but then postponed the process. The official reason given was the public’s growing concern over risks associated with the rapid development of artificial intelligence.

However, some investors have revealed there is another factor: internally, there are doubts as to whether the market can give a reasonable valuation to a company that continues to record losses.

Meanwhile, competitor Anthropic is expected to go public this autumn and may set a record for the largest technology IPO in history, undoubtedly adding complexity to OpenAI’s decision on the best time to go public.