Inside OpenAIs 13 Billion Revenue Surge
Investor and analyst attention was squarely focused on OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar during her recent appearance at the Goldman Sachs tech conference in San Francisco. With the AI giant reportedly raising funds at a colossal $500 billion valuation, the financial world is eager for insights into the company's performance. Friar delivered a presentation packed with key metrics that paint a picture of explosive growth and expanding influence.
OpenAI's Explosive Growth by the Numbers
The interest in OpenAI's trajectory is intense, and the numbers shared by Friar did not disappoint. She provided a detailed breakdown of the company's current standing, highlighting its rapid expansion across both consumer and enterprise sectors.
- Business Split: OpenAI's operations are divided, with 70% focused on its consumer business and 30% on enterprise solutions.
- User Base: The consumer-facing ChatGPT boasts approximately 700 million weekly average users.
- Developer Ecosystem: Around 4 million developers are actively building applications on the OpenAI platform.
- Paid Enterprise Seats: The company has successfully sold about 5 million paid seats for its ChatGPT business products.
- Revenue Growth: OpenAI is projected to hit roughly $13 billion in total revenue this year, a fourfold increase from 2024.
- Investment in Compute: To power this growth, the company spent approximately $2.6 billion on computing resources, a figure Friar indicated was a worthwhile investment driving recurring revenue.
The AI Efficiency Revolution
Friar highlighted significant advancements in the efficiency and capabilities of OpenAI's models. The new model picker in GPT-5 has spurred a notable increase in the use of the company's reasoning capabilities, which now account for 7% of workloads, up from 2% previously. This trend is even more pronounced among enterprise users, where reasoning workloads constitute about 50% of the total.
Perhaps most striking was the dramatic reduction in the cost of AI inference. Friar noted that the cost per token for GPT-4 was around $33. In contrast, the new, faster GPT-5 nano model costs just 9 cents per token. She aptly described this leap in efficiency as "Moore's Law on steroids."
Global Reach and Market Disruption
OpenAI is also making significant inroads into the search market, now holding a 12% share, which has doubled from 6% at the start of 2025. Friar suggested this share might even be undercounted as conversational AI expands the overall volume of search queries.
The company's global footprint is expanding rapidly. Friar pointed out a significant shift in user demographics: "If you look at ChatGPT usage, I think even three months ago, I would have told you it was 15% US, 85% rest of the world. Today, it's 10% US, 90% rest of the world. That tells you how fast the rest of the world is growing."
AI at Work Inside OpenAI
Demonstrating the practical impact of its own technology, Friar shared how AI tools are enhancing productivity within OpenAI. She explained that her finance team leverages coding agents and other AI utilities to accelerate their work. This internal adoption of AI has resulted in OpenAI's finance department being approximately 18% of the size of finance teams at comparable companies, showcasing a powerful example of AI-driven efficiency.
