OpenAI's Chief Financial Officer, Sarah Friar, revealed in a recent interview with CNBC's "Squawk Box" that despite the company's milestone of achieving over $1 billion in monthly revenue for the first time, it still faces significant pressure from the demand for artificial intelligence computing. Friar stated, "The current market demand for GPUs and computing resources is very strong, and our biggest problem is the continuous lack of computing power." This is one of the reasons the company launched the "Interstellar Gate" program, as well as the motivation for its larger-scale construction.
Image source note: The image is AI-generated, and the image licensing service is Midjourney
When talking about the company's cooperation with other technology giants, Friar said that OpenAI is closely cooperating with Oracle and Coreweave to diversify risks and increase the supply of computing resources. Nevertheless, Microsoft remains a key partner of OpenAI. Friar emphasized, "Microsoft will continue to be an important partner for us in the coming years, and their AI products are built based on OpenAI's technology."
Since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of 2022, OpenAI's business has expanded rapidly. According to insiders, the company's revenue is expected to triple this year, reaching $12.7 billion. Meanwhile, OpenAI's annual recurring revenue has recently reached $10 billion. Friar also mentioned that OpenAI's revenue broke through $1 billion for the first time in July, indicating a strong growth momentum. CEO Sam Altman said that the company will invest tens of billions of dollars in data centers in the future to meet the growing demand. "We are confident that demand will continue to grow, and training needs will follow. Our spending will be more proactive than any company has invested in during its development process," Altman said.
It is reported that OpenAI is currently negotiating to sell shares worth about $6 billion, with a valuation of $500 billion. In March of this year, OpenAI completed a $4 billion financing round, becoming one of the largest private tech company fundraising cases in history. In addition, OpenAI has just launched its latest artificial intelligence model, ChatGPT-5. Although the reaction has been mixed, it has still sparked enthusiasm among businesses and developers, with the reasoning workload increasing eightfold. In response to some users' complaints about using previous version models, the company has quickly taken measures to restore related functions. Friar said, "When you have 700 million weekly active users, user demands and feedback will be very diverse." She mentioned that as services are launched, the growth rate of Plus and Pro subscriptions is also accelerating.
Key Points:
🌟 OpenAI achieved its first monthly revenue of over $1 billion, but still faces challenges with computing power shortages.
🤝 Close collaboration with Microsoft has enabled the rapid development of OpenAI's AI products.
🚀 The newly launched ChatGPT-5 has attracted widespread attention, and subscription growth is also accelerating.
