After a year of frenzied dealmaking and rumors of an upcoming IPO, the financial scrutiny into OpenAI is intensifying. Leaked documents obtained by tech blogger Ed Zitron provide more of a glimpse into OpenAI’s financials — specifically its revenue and compute costs over the past couple of years.
Zitron reported this week that in 2024, Microsoft received $493.8 million in revenue share payments from OpenAI. In the first three quarters of 2025, that number jumped to $865.8 million, according to documents he viewed.
OpenAI reportedly shares 20% of its revenue with Microsoft as part of a previous deal where the software giant invested over $13 billion in the powerful AI startup. (Neither the startup nor the people in Redmond have publicly confirmed this percentage.)
However, this is where things get a little sticky, because Microsoft also shares revenue with OpenAI, kicking back about 20% of the revenues from Bing and Azure OpenAI Service, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch. Bing is powered by OpenAI, and the OpenAI Service sells cloud access to OpenAI’s models to developers and businesses.
The source also told TechCrunch that the leaked payments refer to Microsoft’s net revenue share, not the gross revenue share. In other words, they don’t include whatever Microsoft paid to OpenAI from Bing and Azure OpenAI royalties. Microsoft deducts those figures from its internally reported revenue share numbers, according to this person.
Microsoft doesn’t break out how much it makes from Bing and Azure OpenAI in its financial statements, so it’s difficult to estimate how much the tech giant is kicking back.
Nevertheless, the leaked documents provide a window into the hottest company on the private markets today — and not just how much it makes in revenue, but also how much it’s spending in comparison to that revenue.
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So, based on that widely reported 20% revenue-share statistic, we can infer that OpenAI’s revenue was at least $2.5 billion in 2024 and $4.33 billion in the first three quarters of 2025 — but very l …