OpenAI’s public‑facing books paint a picture of a lean software company: zero debt, under $750 million in lease liabilities and $46 million in capital spending for the quarter ended March 31. Those numbers stand in stark contrast to the $665 billion in purchase commitments the firm has quietly amassed off the balance sheet.
The bulk of those commitments are tied to the massive compute power that fuels the company’s language models. OpenAI rents data‑center capacity and custom chips from a consortium of partners, including Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and joint‑venture outfits such as Stargate and Fluidstack. While the obligations are real, they are recorded as purchase commitments rather than debt, keeping them out of the traditional metrics investors use to gauge financial health.
Related‑party transactions dominate OpenAI’s cost structure. About 72 percent of its cost of revenue flows to entities like Microsoft, which not only backs the startup financially but also supplies much of its underlying infrastructure. That concentration of spend with a single partner raises questions about potential conflicts of interest, a red flag for regulators who scrutinize public‑market disclosures.
The timing of these revelations could not be more critical. On June 8, OpenAI filed a confidential registration statement with the SEC, following rival Anthropic’s own filing. Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley are slated to lead the offering, which values the company at roughly $852 billion. Analysts speculate that a successful debut could push the valuation past the $1‑trillion mark, putting OpenAI in the same league as SpaceX’s record‑setting IPO earlier this month.
Revenue projections add another layer of intrigue. OpenAI forecasts advertising earnings to climb from $2.4 billion this year to $102 billion by 2030, a figure that would make ads more than a third of its total sales. Industry monitor WPP estimates the entire AI‑driven search and chatbot ad market will be worth about $101 billion in 2030, a number that already includes giants like Google.
Cash flow, however, tells a different story. The company burned through $34 billion in 2025 and has already spent $3.7 billion in the first quarter of 2026. Those outlays underscore the capital‑intensive nature of the business, even as the headline balance sheet appears deceptively clean.
Regulators will get their first comprehensive look at OpenAI’s accounting practices and the web of related‑party arrangements through the confidential filing. The SEC’s review could determine whether the off‑balance‑sheet commitments need to be disclosed more transparently, a move that might reshape investor expectations ahead of a potential public offering.
In short, OpenAI’s zero‑debt façade masks a sprawling network of compute contracts and partner dependencies that could have far‑reaching implications for the AI supply chain. As the company eyes a historic IPO, the spotlight on its financial architecture is only intensifying.
Este artículo fue escrito con la asistencia de IA.
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