FT: "OpenAI is a money pit with a website on top."

Here's the headline and opening from the Financial Times: 

"OpenAI needs to raise at least $207bn by 2030 so it can continue to lose money, HSBC estimates" 

by Bryce Elder

OpenAI is a money pit with a website on top. That much we know already, but since OpenAI is a private company, there’s a lot of guesswork required when estimating the depth of the pit.

HSBC’s US software and services team has today updated its OpenAI model to include the company’s $250bn rental of cloud compute from Microsoft, announced late in October, and its $38bn rental of cloud compute from Amazon announced less than a week later. The latest two deals add an extra four gigawatts of compute power to OpenAI’s requirements, bringing the contracted amount to 36 gigawatts.

Based on a total cumulative deal value of up to $1.8tn, OpenAI is heading for a data centre rental bill of about $620bn a year — though only a third of the contracted power is expected to be online by the end of this decade. 

The article goes into to detail if you're interested but the pictures alone tell a hell of a story.

Keep in mind, there are signs that while growth is still continuing, it is leveling off rather than accelerating, something which raises questions about the estimated revenue.  

 

The bottom line is that if OpenAI doesn’t explode—absolutely explode—in terms of revenue over the next few years, it is on target to burn through hundreds of billions of dollars.

  

Add to this the dizzying maze of circular financing and the fact that a huge chunk of the markets depend on the sustained growth of OpenAI, and these graphs certainly give a fellow something to think about.