OpenAI’s Lean Balance Sheet Faces Tough IPO Scrutiny
▼ Summary
– OpenAI reports zero debt and $46mn in quarterly capital spending, but has $665bn in off-balance-sheet purchase commitments, mostly for data center and chip rentals.
– The company relies on related parties like Microsoft for 72% of its cost of revenue, raising concerns about conflicts of interest as it prepares for an IPO.
– OpenAI filed confidentially with the SEC in June 2026, with an $852bn valuation that analysts predict could exceed $1tn.
– The company projects advertising revenue rising from $2.4bn in 2025 to $102bn by 2030, a figure that matches the entire projected AI ad market including Google.
– OpenAI spent $34bn in 2025 and burned $3.7bn in Q1 2026, with skeptics warning that a stumble could ripple across the AI supply chain.
On paper, OpenAI presents the profile of a lean, low-overhead software company. Its balance sheet shows zero debt and a modest $46 million in quarterly capital spending, a figure that trails even Salesforce, a company whose core business is simply selling software. But this pristine financial snapshot masks a far heavier reality. For one of the most hardware-intensive enterprises in technology, these numbers are almost too good to be true.
The real story lies off the books. OpenAI carries roughly $665 billion in purchase commitments that are not classified as debt. The vast majority of this is for compute power: long-term contracts to lease the data centers and chips that power its models. The company relies on a web of partners including Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon, and joint ventures like Stargate and Fluidstack for that capacity. These obligations are both real and enormous. They simply do not appear where investors typically look.
That structure raises a second, equally pressing question. Who sits on the other side of these deals? About 72 percent of OpenAI’s cost of revenue flows to related parties, most notably Microsoft. Microsoft is not only a key supplier but also a major financial backer of the company. That kind of concentration invites close scrutiny over conflicts of interest. It is exactly the sort of arrangement that public-market regulators tend to probe with particular care.
This scrutiny arrives at a critical moment. OpenAI filed confidentially with the SEC on 8 June, a week after rival Anthropic, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the deal. The filing valued the company at roughly $852 billion. Analysts believe a public debut could push that figure past $1 trillion, perhaps as soon as this autumn. The filing also gives financial regulators their first proper look at OpenAI’s accounting and its tangled web of business relationships.
None of this would matter if the growth were already there. It is not. OpenAI projects advertising revenue climbing from $2.4 billion this year to $102 billion by 2030. At that point, ads would represent more than a third of total sales. Yet ad group WPP forecasts the entire AI search and chatbot ad market to be worth about $101 billion in 2030, a figure that already includes Google. In short, OpenAI is betting it can capture, on its own, a market the rest of the industry will be fighting over.
The cash, meanwhile, keeps pouring out. OpenAI spent roughly $34 billion last year and burned through $3.7 billion in the first three months of 2026 alone. A clean balance sheet usually reassures investors. This one may do the opposite. Zero debt means little when $665 billion in commitments sit just out of frame. Sceptics already warn that an OpenAI stumble could ripple across the entire AI supply chain.
(Source: The Next Web)
