From The Next Web, September 19:
The cash burn figure everyone is quoting moved the other way, improving from about $305bn in May to $278bn in July. Free cash flow does not capture what partners are carrying.
The Financial Times reported that OpenAI expects negative free cash flow of $278bn between 2026 and 2030, from a July presentation prepared for a computing deal. That figure is an improvement on the roughly $305bn the company projected in May, while the compute and infrastructure line has risen to about $856bn against the roughly $600bn target it gave investors publicly in February. Spending can rise while burn falls because much of the build is financed by partners rather than by OpenAI.
The Financial Times reported that OpenAI expects negative free cash flow of $278bn between 2026 and the end of 2030, citing a company presentation prepared in July for a computing deal. Samantha Oltman wrote up the figures for Bloomberg, which corrected its story shortly after publication.
The same materials put revenue at $350bn in 2030, against roughly $36bn this year, and compute and infrastructure at about $856bn across the period. Three numbers, and the smallest one is getting the headlines.
The burn figure is a downward revision
An earlier projection in May put negative free cash flow for the same period at roughly $305bn. The July version is $278bn.So the number being reported as alarming is an improvement of about $27bn on OpenAI’s own previous estimate. That does not make it small, and it does make the framing odd.
The compute number went the other way
In February the company publicly reset expectations. It told investors its compute target was around $600bn by 2030, a figure presented at the time as a moderation.Five months later a private presentation carries $856bn. That is roughly 43% higher than the number given publicly in February.
One caveat belongs here. The February figure was described as compute and the July figure as computing power and infrastructure, so the categories may not be identical, and part of the gap could be definitional rather than real.
How both movements happen at once
Spending rises, burn falls. That combination is possible when the spending does not sit on your own balance sheet....
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If he was taller his pockets could be deeper.
Trump, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son announce $100bn US investment
Son had made a similar pledge in 2016 to spend $50bn over Trump’s four-year term. It’s unclear how SoftBank will fund the new investment.—Al Jazeera
