2026년 2월 21일 · Unknown · financial · 출처 Yahoo Finance
Amazon (AMZN), Microsoft (MSFT), Nvidia (NVDA), and SoftBank (SFTBY) are close to throwing a lot of money into a furnace, that is, OpenAI.
The first phase of the company’s latest funding round is almost complete, and if the companies invest near the highest ranges of what has been hashed out, the total investment will be close to $100 billion, according to Bloomberg.
Amazon is expected to invest up to $50 billion, SoftBank as much as $30 billion, and Nvidia $20 billion, according to Bloomberg, but Reuters reports that Nvidia will invest $30 billion.
Why am I comparing OpenAI with a money-burning furnace? Well, quite simply, it is not profitable, and it has no clear path to profitability, only ridiculous spending plans.
To understand why this funding is like lighting money on fire, we need to take a look at OpenAI and then examine specific problems with each of the investing companies.Close to $100 billion will be spent on keeping the AI bubble going.Shutterstock·Shutterstock
OpenAI’s spending plans make no sense
Let’s begin by defining ridiculous spending plans.
“We expect to end this year above $20 billion in annualized revenue run rate and grow to hundreds of billion by 2030," OpenAI CEO Sam Altmanposted on X (formerly Twitter) in November 2025. "We are looking at commitments of about $1.4 trillion over the next 8 years.”
Tomasz Tunguz, general partner at Theory Ventures, did the math regarding this plan. He started with a premise that OpenAI has committed to spending $1.15 trillion on hardware & cloud infrastructure between 2025 & 2035, because the information Altman posted wasn’t available yet. So we know that Altman has committed to spending more money in less time. Keep that in mind.
Tunguz's calculation suggested that OpenAI would need to grow from approximately $10 billion in 2024 revenue to $577 billion by 2029. This is roughly the size of Google’s revenue in the same year, he points out, and this is all with a more optimistic timeframe and less total spending.
Internal OpenAI forecasts predict the for-profit part of the company will hit $100 billion in annual revenues in 2029, according to The Information, as reported by Yahoo Finance.
An immense difference exists between what OpenAI will be making and how much it will need. You'd have to believe in unicorns to think OpenAI will achieve its $1.4 trillion spending. It's obvious the company will face renegotiation of existing infrastructure contracts.
OpenAI doesn’t have a path to profitability
How long would it be reasonable to wait for the company to become profitable? OpenAI was founded in 2015, and HSBC Global Investment Research projects that OpenAI still won’t be profitable by 2030, according to Fortune.
Is 15 years of unprofitability sound business? Along with plans to spend $1.4 trillion? I don’t think so.
The company has recently made a U-turn on its plans to keep ChatGPT ad-free. This shows that the subscription-based model isn’t growing fast enough.
There is a huge problem with the new change. Users of services that also serve ads often tolerate them because they expect a certain level of quality and reliability that gets them “hooked” on the service.
OpenAI had an ace up its sleeve with ChatGPT 4o, as it made the model very sycophantic. When the model launched, Altman's very short post on X simply said, “her.” He seemed to imply that 4o was built to foster relationships like the AI in the movie "Her."
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Unfortunately for OpenAI, its sycophantic AI model prompted a series of lawsuits. The most recent one, filed in January, was from a college student alleging that ChatGPT “convinced him that he was an oracle” and “pushed him into psychosis,” as reported by Ars Technica.
The company shut down the model on February 13.
This means the company no longer has a model on which people would tolerate seeing ads. Meanwhile, its competitor, Perplexity, is scrapping plans to put ads in its AI search product, to avoid provoking people's mistrust, reported Wired.
Another OpenAI competitor, Anthropic, recently spent millions to mock OpenAI’s plan to introduce ads, as reported by Reuters.
Even if the introduction of ads to ChatGPT doesn’t result in users migrating to other LLMs, that doesn’t mean ads will suddenly turn OpenAI into a profitable company. “A path to generating several billion dollars in ad revenue in 2026, going to $25B+ by 2030, seems reasonable,” said Evercore ISI’s analyst Mark Mahaney, as Business Insider reported.
That $25 billion number would indeed be impressive if OpenAI didn’t need to spend so much on infrastructure and on training its AI models, and if it didn’t have competitors at all.
To understand how futile all this is, we need to think about profit margins. As AI critic Ed Zitron rightly points out in his blog, AI companies do not factor AI training into their margins, which, as he writes, “is inherently deceptive.”
There isn’t enough data available for OpenAI, but Zitron did the math using data from Anthropic.
Anthropic’s 2025 gross margins were 40%, according to Zitron, but once he added the cost of training, the margins sharply dropped to a negative 53%. That's the true price tag for LLMs.
OpenAI’s margins are probably in the same negative ballpark. This is because LLMs need to be constantly patched for every possible prompt that could turn out to be malicious or could lead to dangerous “hallucinations.”
Models basically have to be trained until the end of time, since an infinite number of prompts could break them. It also means a constantly growing power bill.
The worst part may be that large language models have peaked, and in my opinion, they don’t even work that well.
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