In the 2025 calendar year, OpenAI paid Microsoft $10.59 billion for “Research and development” expenses. We believe this most likely refers to the cost of training OpenAI’s models.
The documents also mention a $6.047 billion charge related to “cost of revenue,” a $527 million charge for sales and marketing, and $42 million in “general and administrative expenses.” In total, OpenAI’s expenses to Microsoft amounted to $17.2 billion.
I’m starting to think this is not all on the up and up.
“cost of revenue” sounds like “cost of goods sold” in a business with tangible products. Rather. It cost $6 of cloud to sell that $34 service
R&D can probably be amortized over the lifetime of the product, in this case the model’s useful sellable lifetime. But a chunk of that is renting compute from MS and the bill’s due.
Doesn’t sound any more fishy than any other business throwing $b around.
Even then they’re still pumping money to MSFT
I’m starting to think this is not all on the up and up.
“cost of revenue” sounds like “cost of goods sold” in a business with tangible products. Rather. It cost $6 of cloud to sell that $34 service
R&D can probably be amortized over the lifetime of the product, in this case the model’s useful sellable lifetime. But a chunk of that is renting compute from MS and the bill’s due.
Doesn’t sound any more fishy than any other business throwing $b around.
It looks a lot like round-tripping to me, big chunks of that money being spent on OpenAI was invested by MSFT in the first place.
“I’m making a capital investment in open AI, oh look an equal amount came back in as expenditures on my cloud service!”
Oh totally that. That’s how all the big guys goose their numbers.