Open AI's Hits $1B Revenue in July

Open AI hit $12B ARR in July of 2025. See NBC for interview with the CFO. They now have 700M weekly active users (WAU) have seen an acceleration with their Pro product ($19.99/month).

Demand for computer power is skyrocketing especially for the reasoning model. Highest traction is with enterprises and developers. Number of tokens popped up 50% from one week to the next. Use of reasoning components of the model are up 8x.

OpenAI's valuation is $500B, and they have announced plans to spend trillions on data centers. Not easy to put all of this into perspective.

One interesting note for me ... as OpenAI looks to personalize the experience for its user based (paid) i.e., create memory, doing so demands more compute power.

Also interesting are her three criteria for creating a moat:

1. Solving a real problem?

2. True business process that is quite complicated?

3. Access to data is unique? 90% of the world's data is behind closed doors.

Interesting for Friar? The Connectors happening. Employees want to use genAI tools to search inside of their Email, Slack, etc. to get answers. She claims OpenAI has gone from 6% to 12% of search share overall in 6 months.

From NBC -

OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar said Wednesday that even as the company hits revenue milestones, it faces ongoing pressures due to the demand for computing power required for artificial intelligence.

“It is voracious right now for GPUs and for compute,” she told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday, adding that insufficient compute, or computing power, to meet the demand of AI is the company’s biggest challenge. “That’s why we launched Stargate. That’s why we’re doing the bigger builds.”

Friar said the growing demand for computing power calls for more partners to diversify risk and increase supply, noting builds with Oracle and Coreweave, but said Microsoft is still very involved.

“Microsoft will be an important partner for years to come, and I think we are very intertwined because of our IP,” Friar said. “Remember, Microsoft AI products are built on OpenAI technology.”

OpenAI has ballooned in size since the launch of ChatGPT in late 2022. This year, the company is expected to triple revenue to $12.7 billion, people familiar with the matter said in March. The company said it recently reached $10 billion in annual recurring revenue.

Friar said Wednesday that OpenAI hit its first $1 billion revenue month in July.