Over $20 billion in annualized revenue in 2025. An $852 billion valuation. The fastest revenue growth in the history of the technology industry. And the CEO who built all of this, Sam Altman, owns 0% of the shares and reported a salary of just $76,001 according to the 2023 IRS filing.
The problem: the deeper you go into OpenAI's numbers, the more unbelievable they become.
This article covers all current numbers, data, and facts about OpenAI as a company: revenue, valuation, investors, employees, products, and infrastructure. For ChatGPT user numbers (monthly active users, growth, global reach), see: ChatGPT Statistics.
- OpenAI reached an annualized revenue of $20B+ at the end of 2025 (3x growth over 2024), the fastest revenue growth in the history of the technology industry
- $852B post-money valuation after the March 2026 round with $122B in fresh capital, the highest for a private company at the time (since surpassed by SpaceX and Anthropic)
- 92% of Fortune 500 companies use OpenAI, and CEO Sam Altman owns 0% of the equity with a reported $76,001 salary (tax year 2023)
1. What is OpenAI?
OpenAI was founded on December 11, 2015 as a nonprofit organization with the stated goal of "ensuring that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity." The founding group read like a who's-who of the tech elite: Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba, and John Schulman.
In 2019, it restructured to a "capped-profit" model. Investor returns are capped at 100 times the initial investment. The nonprofit parent remains the formal controlling entity. In practice, OpenAI now operates like a normal profit-oriented technology company.
Key departures:
- Elon Musk left the board in 2018 due to a conflict of interest with Tesla. He founded xAI in 2023 as a direct competitor with the Grok chatbot.
- Ilya Sutskever left OpenAI in 2024 and founded the safety-focused AI startup Safe Superintelligence.
- Greg Brockman temporarily stepped down in 2024 and returned.
2. Revenue and Growth
OpenAI's revenue trajectory is without parallel in the history of the technology industry:
- 2022: approx. $0.3B
- 2023: approx. $2B
- 2024: approx. $6B
- 2025: $20B+ annualized run rate (confirmed by Sam Altman and CFO Sarah Friar)
- Annualized Feb 2026: approx. $25B (Sacra estimate)
- Run rate March 2026: $2B/month = approx. $24B annualized (officially confirmed by OpenAI, March 31, 2026)
- 2026 revenue target: $29.4B
- 2027 revenue target: $100B (hinted by Altman)
- 2030 revenue target: $280B
Growth rate from 2024 to 2025: approximately 3x ($6B to $20B annualized). Paying users: 50 million total (including 9 million business customers). Altman has put OpenAI's data-center commitments at roughly $1.4 trillion over the next 8 years. However: despite all this enthusiasm, OpenAI is still not sustainably profitable. Infrastructure and personnel costs still exceed revenue in some quarters.
3. Valuation and Investors
No private technology company has ever shown a comparable valuation trajectory. From $1 billion in 2019 to $852 billion in March 2026: a 852x jump in just seven years.
The round was announced in February 2026 with a $730B pre-money valuation (initial $110B volume) and closed on March 31, 2026 with $122B in fresh capital at an $852B post-money valuation. That made OpenAI the most valuable private company in the world in March 2026, since surpassed by SpaceX and Anthropic.
3.1 Funding Rounds
From the $1 billion pledge at the 2015 founding to the $122 billion round in March 2026, the volumes have exploded over the years. The following chart shows the individual rounds at a glance:
OpenAI has received approximately $190 billion in total funding. The March 2026 round at $122 billion (initially announced in February 2026 as $110B) is the largest single funding round in the history of private companies. OpenAI also opened the round to retail investors through bank channels for the first time, raising an additional $3 billion from individual investors.
3.2 Largest Investors
SoftBank, Amazon, and Nvidia carry by far the largest commitments. The following chart shows the key backers by invested volume:
Key investors in detail:
- Amazon: $50B commitment in the March 2026 round (largest single investor). Additional $100B in compute spend over 8 years.
- SoftBank: Over $71B total ($40B in March 2025, $30B in March 2026). Co-lead of the March 2026 round.
- Nvidia: $30B in the March 2026 round, strategic compute partner.
- Microsoft: $13B invested since 2019, Azure partnership and long-term infrastructure commitment.
- Thrive Capital: Lead investor in multiple rounds (2023, 2024).
- Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, D. E. Shaw, MGX, TPG, T. Rowe Price: Significant stakes.
3.3 Valuation Comparison with Other AI Companies
In a direct comparison of the leading private AI companies, OpenAI and Anthropic now sit in a league of their own, far ahead of xAI, Cursor, and Mistral:
xAI has not been an independent private company since its merger with SpaceX in February 2026; the figure above shows its last independent valuation (Series E, January 2026) before the merger.
As of May 2026, OpenAI is no longer the most valuable private AI company. Anthropic took the top spot with its Series H round. In early June 2026, both companies confidentially filed their IPO paperwork with the SEC, OpenAI on June 8 and Anthropic a week earlier (OpenAI, TechCrunch).
By late June 2026, the outlook shifted: according to a New York Times report (cited by Bloomberg, June 25, 2026), OpenAI is leaning toward pushing the actual public listing to 2027 rather than settling for a lower valuation in 2026. Sam Altman called any discount from the targeted $1 trillion valuation a "non-starter."
4. Customers and User Base
- Fortune 500 penetration: 92% (approx. 460 companies)
- Total business customers: 1M+ (milestone reached November 2025)
- ChatGPT enterprise customers: 600,000+ companies
- API calls per day: 2.2B
- EdTech apps on OpenAI API: 3,400+
- Real-time support bots market share: 48%
For ChatGPT user data (monthly active users, worldwide reach, demographic data), see: ChatGPT Statistics.
5. Employees and Compensation
- Employee target: around 8,000 by end of 2026, up from roughly 4,500 at the time (Financial Times, March 2026)
- Average stock-based compensation: $1.5M per employee (record among startups)
- Stock comp as share of revenue: 46.2%
The paradox at the top:
- Sam Altman: 0% equity stake, reported salary per IRS filing (tax year 2023): $76,001. Net worth: $3.3B (via other investments including Helion Energy, Worldcoin)
- Greg Brockman (President): Temporarily stepped down in 2024, returned
Sam Altman leads one of the most valuable private technology companies in the world without owning a single share. That's unprecedented in tech history.
6. Product Portfolio
6.1 Consumer Products
- ChatGPT: 900M Weekly Active Users (details: ChatGPT Statistics)
- Sora: Text-to-video generator (launched 2025)
- GPT Image 2: Text-to-image, integrated in ChatGPT Plus (successor to DALL-E 3)
6.2 Developer and API Products
7. Compute and Infrastructure
- 2026: ~$50B planned compute spending (per Greg Brockman)
- Average through 2030: ~$100B per year
- Long-term target through 2030: $600B
The Stargate project is the most ambitious: a joint venture with SoftBank, Oracle, and ARM to build US AI infrastructure worth $500 billion.
OpenAI's planned ~$50 billion in infrastructure spending for 2026 still trails the largest hyperscalers, but no longer by an order of magnitude. Amazon ($200B), Microsoft ($190B), Google ($185B), and Meta ($135B) each spend more, yet OpenAI now reaches roughly a quarter of Amazon's budget. This is partly due to the Azure partnership, which gives OpenAI access to Microsoft's infrastructure without carrying its own capex.
8. Business Model and Revenue Mix
Today, most of the revenue comes from ChatGPT subscriptions and API sales. The forecast for 2029 shows a clear diversification:
ChatGPT pricing as of 2026:
- Free: Free (GPT-5.5 Instant in standard chat, GPT-5.6 Terra only in ChatGPT Work & Codex, with limits)
- Plus: $20/month (GPT-5.6 family with more usage than Free)
- Pro ($100): $100/month, added April 9, 2026 as a mid-tier with 5x usage vs. Plus (aimed at Codex users)
- Pro ($200): $200/month (all models, higher limits)
- Enterprise: Custom pricing (SSO, admin panel, higher rate limits)
9. Milestones and History
10. Interesting Facts and Records
- Largest single-round funding in history: $122 billion in a single funding round, March 2026.
- CEO with 0% equity: Sam Altman leads a company with an $852B valuation without owning a single share.
- Elon Musk was a co-founder: Today he's one of the sharpest competitors with xAI / Grok and has sued OpenAI multiple times.
- 92% Fortune 500 penetration in less than 4 years since the ChatGPT launch.
- Fastest growth to 100M users: ChatGPT did it in less than a week. Every other service before it took months or years.
- Revenue per day (run rate as of March 2026): approx. $66M, based on $2 billion in monthly revenue officially confirmed by OpenAI on March 31, 2026. That's roughly the annual revenue of a mid-sized company, generated daily.
- Highest average employee compensation among startups: $1.5M in stock compensation per employee per year.
- Stargate project: OpenAI is planning US AI infrastructure worth $500 billion together with SoftBank, Oracle, and ARM.
For more context, see the articles on ChatGPT Statistics, DeepSeek Statistics, and Claude Statistics.
