Survival Race: OpenAI Spending Hit $34B Ahead of Planned IPO

The capital intensity of the generative AI industry has breached a historic ceiling. On June 16, 2026, the Financial Times published leaked financial metrics for OpenAI, revealing that the company's operational spending over the past year reached a shocking $34 billion.

The bulk of these funds went to paying for Microsoft cloud compute and R&D development of multimodal reasoning models. These figures explain Sam Altman's aggressive push to execute an IPO as quickly as possible and transform ChatGPT into a superapp: the company urgently needs tens of billions of dollars in Wall Street liquidity. The frontier model market has turned into an industry of total capital exhaustion, where survival is reserved for entities capable of burning through budgets equivalent to superpower defense ministries.

Source: Financial Times / Reuters