According to Financial Times reporting based on investor documents, OpenAI's annualized revenue for September is close to $50 billion. That figure is roughly $20 billion lower than the widely cited $70 billion estimate that several outlets published late last month, citing the same investor materials.
Annualized revenue — together with the comparable metric from rival Anthropic — is treated as a key indicator of global demand for generative AI, and it affects the pace of infrastructure investments and market expectations. The Financial Times says the gap largely reflects differences in accounting methodology between Anthropic and OpenAI.
Anthropic includes sales that are realised via cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Google Cloud in its annualized revenue. By contrast, OpenAI does not count those cloud-mediated sales in the same way in the investor materials reviewed. Adjusting OpenAI’s revenues according to that methodological difference had previously produced a reported August annualized revenue of about $40 billion.
The investor documents also stated that OpenAI’s revenues grew by more than 70 percent, and that growth rate underpinned the earlier $70 billion estimate. OpenAI declined to comment on the media reports when approached.
The distinction matters for markets and infrastructure providers because comparing annualized revenue across firms can shape perceptions of industry growth, particularly when companies apply different accounting treatments to sales routed through cloud platforms.
Note
This article is not investment advice. An AI assistant contributed to preparing this report; the final content was edited and verified by a human journalist.
