Sam Altman Says OpenAI Revenue Is Over $13 Billion and Growing Steeply

OpenAI is doing “well more” than $13 billion in revenue, CEO Sam Altman said on a BG2Pod podcast over the weekend.

That figure has been widely reported, and some observers have wondered how OpenAI could pay for its recent compute deals with $13 billion in revenue, according to Seeking Alpha, which flagged Altman’s remarks in a Monday (Nov. 3) report.

“First of all, we’re doing well more revenue than that,” Altman said on the podcast, adding that the company’s revenue is growing steeply, per the report.

When one of the podcast’s hosts asked if OpenAI could reach $100 billion in revenue in 2028 or 2029, Altman said, according to the report, “How about ’27?”

OpenAI and AWS announced Monday that they reached a $38 billion agreement that enables OpenAI to run its artificial intelligence (AI) workloads on AWS infrastructure.

Under the agreement, OpenAI is accessing AWS compute comprising hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs and can expand to tens of millions of CPUs to scale agentic workloads.

“Scaling frontier AI requires massive, reliable compute,” Altman said in a press release announcing the deal. “Our partnership with AWS strengthens the broad compute ecosystem that will power this next era and bring advanced AI to everyone.”

In an Oct. 29 post on X, Altman said OpenAI would like to build an AI factory to make 1 gigawatt of compute per week of new capacity and do “at a greatly reduced cost relative to today.”

The company has committed to about 30 gigawatts of compute with a total cost of ownership of about $1.4 trillion.

“We are comfortable with this given what we see on the horizon for model capability growth and revenue growth,” Altman said in the post.

It was reported Oct. 28 that OpenAI is planning an initial public offering that could value the company at up to $1 trillion.

The AI startup is considering filing with regulators as soon as the second half of next year, according to the report.

On BG2Pod, Altman said, per the Seeking Alpha report, that there are “not many times that I want to be a public company” but that he would like OpenAI to be one to hurt short sellers.