> OpenAI is projecting that its total revenue for 2030 will be more than $280 billion
For context, that is more than the annual revenue of all but 3 tech companies in the world (Nvidia, Apple, Google), and about the same as Microsoft.
OpenAI meanwhile is projected to make $20 billion in 2026. So a casual 1300% revenue growth in under 4 years for a company that is already valued in the hundreds of billions.
Must be nice to pull numbers out of one's ass with zero consequence.
raincole 40 minutes ago [-]
> a casual 1300% revenue growth in under 4 years for a company that is already valued in the hundreds of billions.
Such a weird sentence. The correct causality should be: It's valued in the hundreds of billions because the investors expect a 1300% revenue growth.
AvAn12 30 minutes ago [-]
And if we all buy umbrellas, then it will start to rain??
tibbar 27 minutes ago [-]
The metaphor for the original post was more like "You're already wearing a raincoat and umbrella, and you're forecasting a flood warning?" So, the flood warning (project revenue) may be completely incorrect, but it's not incongruous with the fact that I'm wearing a raincoat and umbrella (current investor valuation). :-)
jonas21 26 minutes ago [-]
If you go outside and everyone else is carrying an umbrella, it's probably going to rain.
camdenreslink 17 minutes ago [-]
Or the town has been hoodwinked by a smooth talking umbrella salesman.
quxbar 14 minutes ago [-]
If you go outside and they are burning witches, it's best to go along with it.
Imustaskforhelp 10 minutes ago [-]
If you go outside and see people buying tulips, it doesn't mean that tulips are great investments.
So even if NEWTON, the legendary ISAAC NEWTON could lose money in bubble and was left holding umbrellas when there was no rain.
From the book Intelligent investor, I want to get a quote so here it goes (opened the book from my shelf, the page number is 13)
The great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not hte madness of the people"
This quote seems soo applicable in today's world, I am gonna create a parent comment about it as well.
Also, For the rest of Newton's life, he forbade anyone to speak the words "South Sea" in his pressence.
Newton lost more than $3 Million in today's money because of the south sea company bubble.
jwolfe 20 minutes ago [-]
They said casual, not causal.
raincole 18 minutes ago [-]
I didn't read it wrong. And the illogical part isn't 'casual.' It's the whole sentence, especially 'already.'
rchaud 12 minutes ago [-]
How much money was WeWork supposed to bring in when they were valued at $50 billion and it dropped to $10b when they put out their S-1 and faced some public scrutiny for the first time? This happened before covid and the switch to WFH. Were their investors unaware of their actual finances?
0cf8612b2e1e 55 minutes ago [-]
I like the little blurb at the end which said that Codex had 1.5 million users. So, if you can get each of them to pony up a mere $186k a piece, they can hit those revenue numbers.
lm28469 47 minutes ago [-]
> Codex had 1.5 million users
I'm three of them and I never spent a cent on any llms, I doubt I'm the only one
sunaookami 53 minutes ago [-]
Don't forget that Codex is free until March so the numbers are heavily inflated.
akudha 15 minutes ago [-]
I have used AI a bit, like it for a bunch of use cases. But god damn, these numbers are so big. Gotta wonder, are the returns even worth it? RAM prices up, electricity prices up, hard disk prices up… Maybe this is the price to pay for “progress”, but it sure is wild
tibbar 18 minutes ago [-]
Today I got a feature request from another team in a call. I typed into our slack channel as a note. Someone typed @cursor and moments later the feature was implemented (correctly) and ready to merge.
The tools are good! The main bottleneck right now is better scaffolding so that they can be thoroughly adopted and so that the agents can QA their own work.
I see no particular reason not to think that software engineering as we know it will be massively disrupted in the next few years, and probably other industries close behind.
ActionHank 32 minutes ago [-]
Consequences come later friendo.
surgical_fire 2 minutes ago [-]
Just remember that the Dildo of Consequences rarely comes lubed.
re-thc 31 minutes ago [-]
> and about the same as Microsoft
> Must be nice to pull numbers out of one's ass with zero consequence.
Seems accurate?
What they are saying is if Microsoft ends up buying the rest of their shares then i.e. Microsoft's total revenue by 2030 will be more than $280 billion.
Betelbuddy 54 minutes ago [-]
Its a circular economy...He is talking about the money moving from Nvidia to OpenAI and back to Nvidia. You got to go with the flow...
Nvidia gives money to OpenAI so they can buy GPUs that don't exist yet with memory that doesn't exist yet so they can plug them into their datacenters that don't exist yet powered by infrastructure that doesn't exist yet so they can all make profit that is mathematically impossible at this point - Stolen from someone else.
ceejayoz 47 minutes ago [-]
There are other forms of money transfer than revenue.
paul7986 21 minutes ago [-]
I was a paying customer ($20 a month) until AI prompted a layoff in my dying field that is web design and front end design coding. Now everytime chatGPT yells at me about memory i tell it fine Im just gonna use Gemini! I bet a lot of ppl are doing the same thing as both sit at the top of the iPhone charts.
mnky9800n 1 hours ago [-]
I too have reset my spending expectations down from $1.4T.
AvAn12 29 minutes ago [-]
A wise move.
kylehotchkiss 15 minutes ago [-]
ugh lower the interest rates Jerome, I'll do anything to tank the economy until you finally do.
johnwheeler 30 minutes ago [-]
best comment
Saig6 46 minutes ago [-]
The 1.4T commitments was over 8 years, not by 2030.
> After previously boasting $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments, OpenAI is now telling investors that it plans to spend $600 billion by 2030.
does the word "commitment" have a different meaning in this context? How do you cut a commitment >50%? OpenAI's partners are making decisions based on the previous commitment because.. OpenAI committed to it. I must be completely wrong because how does this not set off a severe chain reaction?
raincole 6 minutes ago [-]
> how does this not set off a severe chain reaction?
Just like you and me, Sam Altman can say anything he likes to say. To pump the investors' confidence, to make the US administration believe he's serious about AGI, or just to make himself feel good. It's not legally binding in any way.
You should never read it as "OpenAI committed to..." but as "Altman said these words..." and words mean very little today.
fxtentacle 18 minutes ago [-]
I think TSMC laughed them out of the room when they announced the original numbers. So maybe there’s no reaction now because everyone already knew not to trust OpenAI’s promises.
fred_is_fred 11 minutes ago [-]
These were more like infrastructure suggestions.
locusofself 1 hours ago [-]
The market is spooked by capex projections generally. Interesting that Microsoft, despite some apparent hesitation in 2025, seems to be still going all in on AI spend over the next several years according to the most recent earnings call.
agentifysh 25 minutes ago [-]
MS, GOOG bonds being sold to fund capex still put them green $/employee, they will survive of not thrive.
OpenAI...not so sure, they need an IPO soon while public still is high off the double bull run post 2020
ryandvm 55 minutes ago [-]
I don't get it.
A trillion here, a trillion there and all the AI companies are also telling us they're planning on wiping out 2/3 of jobs in the next 10 years? Nothing about the economics of the AI boom makes any sense.
I'm not saying it's not possible, but if we wipe out 2/3 of jobs with AI, who is going to be buying *all the stuff*?
Unemployed people aren't much of a demographic, and you can't just say UBI because that doesn't make sense either. You think the billionaires are going to allow themselves to be taxed heavily enough to support UBI just so that there's a market for people to buy stuff from them? That's nonsense.
Not trying to creep anybody out, but I just don't see a stable outcome for a society that doesn't need 2/3 of the population.
famouswaffles 36 minutes ago [-]
>I'm not saying it's not possible, but if we wipe out 2/3 of jobs with AI, who is going to be buying all the stuff?
Money is just a proxy for access to resources. If a machine that is capable of replacing almost all jobs is really created then money will matter much less than access to said machine.
Taken to the extreme to make the point, if you had a genie that could grant your every wish, what would you need money for ?
sarchertech 20 minutes ago [-]
Yeah but what if that genie charges money for wishes.
rustyhancock 42 minutes ago [-]
In fairness it's mostly Anthropic that is constantly banging the were taking your jobs drum.
Everyone else has been less explicit, likely because it's just not politically a good idea to keep pronouncing it.
It's part of Anthropics marketing though. Maybe to push the idea you can't beat us so join us?
lumost 14 minutes ago [-]
Anthropic is running a similar marketing campaign as AWS/Devops tools which were trying to replace in-house IT. Pitch to the few that you can be 10/100x as productive and valuable on the hopes that they will push their organizations in this direction.
SV_BubbleTime 42 minutes ago [-]
> Nothing about the economics of the AI boom makes any sense.
what if… MBAs turned from economics to a religion and no one noticed?
pluralmonad 13 minutes ago [-]
Econ has always been a bit faith based as it is.
fxtentacle 20 minutes ago [-]
Unbelievable! Next you’ll tell us that Elon‘s self driving car promises were all just hype for the cult…
kylehotchkiss 13 minutes ago [-]
UBI is a more of a convenient trick we use to suppress the part of our conscious that tells us "wiping out 2/3 of American jobs is Bad".
tgrowazay 46 minutes ago [-]
> You think the billionaires are going to allow themselves to be taxed heavily enough to support UBI
They will have no choice. Proletariat must not be hungry and agitated. Free legal MJ for everyone!
irishcoffee 40 minutes ago [-]
A gramme a day...
llIIllIIllIIl 29 minutes ago [-]
Keeps the doctor away?
hxbdg 46 minutes ago [-]
[dead]
tyre 1 hours ago [-]
It’s interesting that they felt the need to leak this to the press.[0] Some investors or partners (or LPs, board members, etc. of those) are getting spooked by the spending plans and rightfully questioning if the return is there. Putting it in public my feel like a stronger commitment (though I doubt it.)
Even with the revised numbers, I cannot believe that they’ll have $280bn in revenue by 2030.
[0]: You can tell by the reason the sources are granted anonymity: because the information is private, not because they aren’t authorized to speak on the matter
jjkaczor 43 minutes ago [-]
So are all the RAM, GPU and HD manufacturers going to honour their purchasing commitments?
givemeethekeys 1 hours ago [-]
So handwavy... 1.4T.. 600B. Pure marketing fluff to keep the hype machine going.
29 minutes ago [-]
carefree-bob 1 hours ago [-]
These numbers were always out of line with basic infrastructure constraints. People were talking like the US would build 50 new nuclear power plants in 10 years. And I believe we will not see $600B either, there are basic infrastructure, permitting, and power delivery limits.
0cf8612b2e1e 52 minutes ago [-]
However, we are all going to be paying higher energy costs for these ridiculous infrastructure claims. Utilities typically price out energy three years in advance. If they were protecting for twice as many energy sinks, that represents an enormous amount of generation capacity which needs to be accounted for in projections.
I saw a report that previous capacity pricing was $28/MWh/day. Latest numbers have shot up to $300.
carefree-bob 28 minutes ago [-]
Absolutely, and that's why we should be applying higher infrastructure fees to the permitting of data centers. The problem is that local governments want the tax revenue and are willing to screw over their constituents. This also goes in line with the decline of local newspapers, there is an epidemic of fraud and abuse of power happening in local governments across the country.
oxag3n 60 minutes ago [-]
We are at the end of the exponential!
90% chance in 6-12 months spending expectations drop to $0.
iSloth 41 minutes ago [-]
Based on what? Each model so far has been noticeably better than the last, so I don’t see why the next wouldn’t be too?
oxag3n 39 minutes ago [-]
"Can’t you just draw an exponential line on the curve?" - Dario Amodei, February 13th 2026.
But this time draw it for spending expectations.
lumost 1 hours ago [-]
Didn't oracle take out real loans and spend real dollars based on this commitment?
dragonwriter 56 minutes ago [-]
Wasn't it always an expectation, not a commitment?
If they didn't appropriately account for risk that the expectation would not pan out, well, that's on them.
gehsty 29 minutes ago [-]
It is insane that they have this little of a handle on their buildout. It makes the $600B feel even more empheral.
louiereederson 44 minutes ago [-]
This article is bad. It is mixing up capex and opex. OpenAI is projecting more spending on compute through their income statement now than they were 6 months ago.
cmiles8 1 hours ago [-]
This is more complicated than just hand wavy spending expectation resets. Other companies were taking these “commitments” and gearing up for capital investments to meet all that demand which is now vaporizing. That creates a big mess as the hype AI hype machine starts to unravel.
This looks very much like a careful move to deflate the bubble without popping it, but we’ve likely passed that point.
agentifysh 30 minutes ago [-]
as I've said previously, OpenAI will be bailed out by US taxpayers. This isnt just another bubble, its a bubble within a bubble.
Seeing the same setup in 2008 and now. Enjoy your subsidized $200/month codex because its going to go up in the future.
From another comment I wrote here but I am gonna paste a quote I found from Intelligent Investor (page 13) from Isaac Newton during the hottest stock of his time in his country, South Sea company.
The great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people"
There seems to be a lot of madness happening in the world again as well. A lot of OpenAI claims make no sense except if we consider the world to have gone mad.
The bubbly nature of openAI and just doing whatever they think like doing with 0 regards to anything or everything including financials is a form of madness.
I was reading another comment and actually opened up the Intelligent Investor book to read the quote from there. I highly recommend that book although truth be told that I haven't read more than the first 50-100 pages as I quickly felt like passive investment is a great vehicle personally.
kjkjadksj 38 minutes ago [-]
So does that mean they aren’t buying up all storage production capacity for the foreseeable future now?
ralusek 37 minutes ago [-]
Has AI transformed the economy radically? Yes.
Will it continue to transform the economy radically? Yes.
Will that translate to the model-makers somehow capturing the entire value of the transformed economy? No.
There were a few key moments that revealed this. When OpenAI initially declared "there is no moat," I wasn't sure whether to believe them. GPT 3.5 and 4 were so much better than the competition, it felt like them saying that they had no moat was some sort of attempt to avoid regulation or scrutiny. But then, lo and behold, Claude and Gemini caught up; there really was no moat.
But up until then, while it was clear that there was no moat around OpenAI, it was unclear if there was a moat around big tech. Mistral was meh. Even Meta's were meh. We also had no idea how much these models actually cost to run. It wasn't until the "DeepSeek moment," and especially once these open source models actually started being hosted on third party services, that it became clear that this was actually a competitive landscape.
And as has already been demonstrated, because the interface for all of these models is just plain language, the cost of switching models is basically non-existent.
random3 32 minutes ago [-]
"there is no moat" usually mean "we have no moat" or "we want you to believe we have no moat". There are always moats, like being directly in front of eyes and thumbs (Apple) or having extensive data (Google) along hardware production capabilities, datacenters, and tons of money.
34 minutes ago [-]
Rendered at 20:28:44 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
For context, that is more than the annual revenue of all but 3 tech companies in the world (Nvidia, Apple, Google), and about the same as Microsoft.
OpenAI meanwhile is projected to make $20 billion in 2026. So a casual 1300% revenue growth in under 4 years for a company that is already valued in the hundreds of billions.
Must be nice to pull numbers out of one's ass with zero consequence.
Such a weird sentence. The correct causality should be: It's valued in the hundreds of billions because the investors expect a 1300% revenue growth.
Another example is how Isaac Newton lost money on some other bubble as well: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/market-crash-cost-... [ The market crash which cost newton fortune]
So even if NEWTON, the legendary ISAAC NEWTON could lose money in bubble and was left holding umbrellas when there was no rain.
From the book Intelligent investor, I want to get a quote so here it goes (opened the book from my shelf, the page number is 13)
The great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not hte madness of the people"
This quote seems soo applicable in today's world, I am gonna create a parent comment about it as well.
Also, For the rest of Newton's life, he forbade anyone to speak the words "South Sea" in his pressence.
Newton lost more than $3 Million in today's money because of the south sea company bubble.
I'm three of them and I never spent a cent on any llms, I doubt I'm the only one
The tools are good! The main bottleneck right now is better scaffolding so that they can be thoroughly adopted and so that the agents can QA their own work.
I see no particular reason not to think that software engineering as we know it will be massively disrupted in the next few years, and probably other industries close behind.
> Must be nice to pull numbers out of one's ass with zero consequence.
Seems accurate?
What they are saying is if Microsoft ends up buying the rest of their shares then i.e. Microsoft's total revenue by 2030 will be more than $280 billion.
He is counting on hundreds of husbands: https://xkcd.com/605/
Garbage in, garbage out, same as before.
https://x.com/sama/status/1986514377470845007
> After previously boasting $1.4 trillion in infrastructure commitments, OpenAI is now telling investors that it plans to spend $600 billion by 2030.
does the word "commitment" have a different meaning in this context? How do you cut a commitment >50%? OpenAI's partners are making decisions based on the previous commitment because.. OpenAI committed to it. I must be completely wrong because how does this not set off a severe chain reaction?
Just like you and me, Sam Altman can say anything he likes to say. To pump the investors' confidence, to make the US administration believe he's serious about AGI, or just to make himself feel good. It's not legally binding in any way.
You should never read it as "OpenAI committed to..." but as "Altman said these words..." and words mean very little today.
OpenAI...not so sure, they need an IPO soon while public still is high off the double bull run post 2020
A trillion here, a trillion there and all the AI companies are also telling us they're planning on wiping out 2/3 of jobs in the next 10 years? Nothing about the economics of the AI boom makes any sense.
I'm not saying it's not possible, but if we wipe out 2/3 of jobs with AI, who is going to be buying *all the stuff*?
Unemployed people aren't much of a demographic, and you can't just say UBI because that doesn't make sense either. You think the billionaires are going to allow themselves to be taxed heavily enough to support UBI just so that there's a market for people to buy stuff from them? That's nonsense.
Not trying to creep anybody out, but I just don't see a stable outcome for a society that doesn't need 2/3 of the population.
Money is just a proxy for access to resources. If a machine that is capable of replacing almost all jobs is really created then money will matter much less than access to said machine. Taken to the extreme to make the point, if you had a genie that could grant your every wish, what would you need money for ?
Everyone else has been less explicit, likely because it's just not politically a good idea to keep pronouncing it.
It's part of Anthropics marketing though. Maybe to push the idea you can't beat us so join us?
what if… MBAs turned from economics to a religion and no one noticed?
They will have no choice. Proletariat must not be hungry and agitated. Free legal MJ for everyone!
Even with the revised numbers, I cannot believe that they’ll have $280bn in revenue by 2030.
[0]: You can tell by the reason the sources are granted anonymity: because the information is private, not because they aren’t authorized to speak on the matter
I saw a report that previous capacity pricing was $28/MWh/day. Latest numbers have shot up to $300.
90% chance in 6-12 months spending expectations drop to $0.
But this time draw it for spending expectations.
If they didn't appropriately account for risk that the expectation would not pan out, well, that's on them.
This looks very much like a careful move to deflate the bubble without popping it, but we’ve likely passed that point.
Seeing the same setup in 2008 and now. Enjoy your subsidized $200/month codex because its going to go up in the future.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46439545
The great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people"
There seems to be a lot of madness happening in the world again as well. A lot of OpenAI claims make no sense except if we consider the world to have gone mad.
The bubbly nature of openAI and just doing whatever they think like doing with 0 regards to anything or everything including financials is a form of madness.
I was reading another comment and actually opened up the Intelligent Investor book to read the quote from there. I highly recommend that book although truth be told that I haven't read more than the first 50-100 pages as I quickly felt like passive investment is a great vehicle personally.
Will it continue to transform the economy radically? Yes.
Will that translate to the model-makers somehow capturing the entire value of the transformed economy? No.
There were a few key moments that revealed this. When OpenAI initially declared "there is no moat," I wasn't sure whether to believe them. GPT 3.5 and 4 were so much better than the competition, it felt like them saying that they had no moat was some sort of attempt to avoid regulation or scrutiny. But then, lo and behold, Claude and Gemini caught up; there really was no moat.
But up until then, while it was clear that there was no moat around OpenAI, it was unclear if there was a moat around big tech. Mistral was meh. Even Meta's were meh. We also had no idea how much these models actually cost to run. It wasn't until the "DeepSeek moment," and especially once these open source models actually started being hosted on third party services, that it became clear that this was actually a competitive landscape.
And as has already been demonstrated, because the interface for all of these models is just plain language, the cost of switching models is basically non-existent.