OpenAI just posted its first $10 billion quarter

OpenAI has told investors it brought in $10 billion of revenue in a single quarter for the first time — a milestone that underlines just how fast the company behind ChatGPT is growing, and how much money it is still spending to get there.

The figure covers the three months to September. According to Bloomberg, which first reported the number, revenue rose nearly 50 percent from about $6.7 billion in the second quarter, and roughly tripled compared with the same period a year earlier. OpenAI disclosed the figure to investors on a call on November 10, and its chief financial officer, Sarah Friar, confirmed the number and the growth rate on the record in an interview with CNBC the same day, calling it a "blockbuster quarter".

It is worth being precise about what this is. OpenAI is a private company, so there is no public filing behind these numbers. What we know comes from what the company told its investors and what its CFO said publicly — not from audited accounts. That matters, because the headline figure is only half the story.

The other half is the cost. According to investor documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI's adjusted operating loss widened to $10.9 billion in the quarter, up from $10.1 billion. In other words, the company spent considerably more than it took in — even as revenue surged. OpenAI did not respond to Reuters' request for comment on the loss figures.

There is a more encouraging signal inside those numbers, though. The company's adjusted operating margin improved from negative 150 percent to negative 109 percent — meaning losses, while still enormous, are shrinking as a share of revenue. The business is scaling: each new dollar of revenue is costing less to produce than the dollar before it.

The shape of the business is changing too. Enterprise revenue doubled in the quarter, and revenue is now split roughly fifty-fifty between business customers and consumers. That balance matters, because enterprise contracts tend to be stickier and more predictable than consumer subscriptions — a steadier foundation for a company whose costs run into the tens of billions.

On an annualised basis, the third-quarter figure implies a run rate of around $50 billion — the revenue the company would bring in over a full year if it kept earning at the third quarter's pace. That is a different number from the roughly $70 billion annualised recurring revenue figure that has also been reported for OpenAI, and the two should not be confused: the run rate is a simple annualisation of one quarter's revenue, while annualised recurring revenue is a forward-looking measure based on current subscription bookings.

The quarter comes as OpenAI is in the middle of a funding round at a reported valuation of $1.25 trillion — a figure that would put the private company among the most valuable in the world. Investors are, in effect, betting that the gap between revenue and spending will keep closing as the business scales.

There is also a revealing comparison in the same news cycle. Anthropic, OpenAI's closest rival, reported roughly $17 billion of revenue in the same quarter in its IPO filing. That would make Anthropic's quarterly revenue larger than OpenAI's — but the comparison is not clean, because the two companies calculate revenue differently. What is clear is that the two companies are now operating at a scale where their quarterly numbers are measured in the tens of billions, not the hundreds of millions.

The $10 billion quarter is, then, both a landmark and a warning. A landmark because few companies in history have grown revenue this fast at this scale. A warning because the losses are still growing in absolute terms — $10.9 billion in a single quarter — and the company's future depends on revenue continuing to outrun the enormous cost of the computing power behind its models.

For now, though, the direction of travel is clear. Revenue nearly doubled in a quarter, enterprise sales doubled, margins improved, and the CFO is calling it a blockbuster. The question for the next few quarters is whether OpenAI can keep that pace — and whether the losses finally start to shrink in dollars, not just as a percentage.