OpenAI ‘Compute Margin’ Doubles Over Nearly Two Years

OpenAI has reportedly seen better margins from its paid offerings this year.

A report Sunday (Dec. 21) from The Information — also cited by Bloomberg News — says the artificial intelligence (AI) startup has improved on its “compute margin,” an in-house metric for the share of revenue after it factors in the cost of running AI models for its paying corporate and consumer users.

As of October, that margin came to 70%, the report said, citing a source familiar with the matter. That’s up from 52% at the end of 2024, and double the rate in January of last year. The Information added that while OpenAI has better compute margins than rival Anthropic for paid customers, Anthropic shows better over efficiency on server spending.

While OpenAI and its ChatGPT kicked off the current AI boom, the company, last valued at $500 billion, has yet to turn a profit amid worries about a bubble in the sector. Earlier this month, CEO Sam Altman reportedly declared a “code red,” calling on employees to bolster ChatGPT amid increased competition from Google and Anthropic.

Last week saw a series of reports about the company’s fundraising plans, which could value it at anywhere from $750 billion to $830 billion.

Meanwhile, consumers have spent more than $3 billion on the ChatGPT mobile app in the roughly 31 months since it was launched, according to findings last week from mobile analytics and intelligence platform Appfigures.

The bulk of that figure — $2.5 billion — was spent just this year, with spending up 408% since last year, the report found. Appfigures also noted that the speed with which the ChatGPT mobile app arrived at the $3 billion milestone in mobile consumer spending was faster than TikTok and major streaming apps.

As PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster wrote last week, close to 900 million people submit queries to ChatGPT each week, driving 2.5 billion queries a day. That’s happened over three years, while Google took 13 years to achieve such volume.

PYMNTS Intelligence data shows that more than half the U.S. population uses ChatGPT and other chatbots for the various pillars of the connected economy, the activities guiding the way people “shop, pay, live, work, eat, stay well, have fun, travel, communicate, and bank.”

There are 30 million power users who turn to their chatbot for 25 or more of the 54 activities that represent these connected economy pillars. More than 80% of those users deploy AI for shopping discovery, daily planning, learning and even health and wellness.

“In just three short years, more likely in just the last 12 months, they’ve rewired their entire digital footprint around these conversational interfaces,” Webster wrote.

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