OpenAI burned through $3.7bn in the first three months of 2026, more than half its revenue of $5.7bn over the same period, according to The Information, which cited documents the company shared with shareholders.
Both numbers tripled from a year earlier, a symmetry that captures the company’s peculiar position: growing faster than almost any business in history, and spending faster still.
The tripling is the figure worth pausing on. Revenue of $5.7bn in a single quarter would be the envy of nearly any technology company; revenue that grew threefold year on year is rarer still. The trouble is that the cost of producing it grew at the same rate.
Scaling has not yet bought OpenAI the operating leverage that usually rewards a company this size, because the thing it sells, frontier-model inference, gets more expensive to deliver as more people use it.
The balance sheet looks, on its face, reassuring. OpenAI held more than $73bn in cash and marketable securities at the end of the quarter, up from $40bn at the end of December.
