OpenAI $140B Revenue: Dream or Hallucination?

In today’s Cloud Wars Minute, I question whether OpenAI’s $140 billion enterprise revenue target is a realistic strategy or a speculative leap.

Highlights

00:03 — It was announced recently, or revealed recently, that OpenAI expects that its revenue will hit about $280 billion by the year 2030, half of that enterprise, half of it consumer. So that would mean that by 2030, OpenAI, according to this CNBC report citing anonymous, confidential sources, will have its enterprise revenue be about $140 billion in five years, or less than five years now.

00:48 — As Larry Ellison said, “The baby could talk.” There has been a huge amount of interest around OpenAI. It has also stirred up considerable head-scratching with its agreements to purchase $300 billion of AI training and inferencing from Oracle, and about the same amount, maybe even a little more, from Microsoft. Now, all of this has people wondering, who is this company? What's it going to do?

01:47 — They said it's confidential, but they've seen information about OpenAI’s plans, so maybe we need to take this with a grain of salt. And I typically regard anonymous sourcing reports with about the same passion and love that I have for skin rashes. But I think because of the implications here for OpenAI and what it might mean, I thought this was at least worth mentioning.

02:26 — But they also said that, seeing that OpenAI has now changed its projections for how much compute or AI infrastructure spending it needs to do, Sam Altman had recently said it's going to be $1.4 trillion. Well now, according to the CNBC report, he's pulled that back to about $600 billion. That's a cut of $800 billion, or about 57% of the projections.

03:36 — So the more compute spending we do, the more revenue OpenAI is able to get—that is her premise. Now, if they are indeed cutting their compute and AI infrastructure spending by $800 billion, how then does that equate to this explosive revenue growth? And was that premise—that compute growth equals revenue growth—not true?

04:29 — Now, what about if key suppliers such as Oracle and Microsoft, perhaps Google Cloud, perhaps AWS, are also in this expansive scheme by OpenAI to reach $140 billion in enterprise revenue in four and a half years? What if they become competitors? How do they feel about continuing to be the suppliers of this engine of revenue growth?

05:26 — I don't mean in raising these questions to diminish the impact or the potential that OpenAI has. I think, like any fast-growing category creator as OpenAI has been, there's no roadmap, nobody's done this before, there's no playbook, and they've got to make this up as they go along.

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