Coding Horizon

OpenAI’s $12B Bet Just Exposed The Whole AI Bubble

Sources for every figure, date and quoted description this video puts on screen.

The CoreWeave contract

Value: up to $11.9 billion. Announced 10 March 2025.

CoreWeave’s own announcement is the primary source. It says CoreWeave will “deliver AI infrastructure” to OpenAI and will provide “dedicated compute capacity for OpenAI’s model training and services”, expanding “OpenAI’s compute capacity for training and delivering its latest models at scale to its hundreds of millions of users around the world”.

Term: five years. The press release itself does not state the term. Reuters and CNBC both reported it as a five year contract on the day.

Equity leg. As part of the agreement OpenAI took a $350 million stake in CoreWeave, issued as shares in a private placement at the time of CoreWeave’s IPO. Same sources.

It grew afterwards. The March deal was the first of several. CoreWeave expanded the OpenAI agreement by up to $4 billion in May 2025, and later by up to a further $6.5 billion.

OpenAI’s first half of 2025

Figures from financial disclosures made to OpenAI shareholders, obtained and reported by The Information in late September 2025, and carried on the Reuters wire the same day.

Line First half 2025
Revenue about $4.3 billion
Change against all of 2024 up about 16%
Cash burn $2.5 billion
Research and development $6.7 billion
Cost of revenue more than $2.5 billion
Cash and securities at period end about $17.5 billion

The revenue figure being higher than the whole of 2024 is the same fact as the 16% line: 2024 revenue was about $3.7 billion.

At the halfway point OpenAI was still working to a full year target of $13 billion of revenue against $8.5 billion of cash burn, which is the number the leaked full year accounts below should be read against.

OpenAI’s full year 2025, from the leaked accounts

Audited 2025 financial documents obtained by Ed Zitron and independently verified by the Financial Times, published June 2026.

Line Full year 2025
Revenue $13.07 billion
Total costs and expenses about $34 billion
Operating loss about $20.9 billion
Research and development $19.18 billion
Sales and marketing $5.73 billion
Cost of revenue $7.5 billion
Paid to Microsoft for cloud and R&D support about $17.2 billion

Revenue grew from $3.7 billion in 2024 to $13.07 billion in 2025. The headline net loss reported alongside these documents is larger than the operating loss, because it carries non operating items; the video uses the revenue and total cost figures only, which are the two the narration states.

ChatGPT adoption

The twenty dollars a month figure

ChatGPT Plus, the consumer paid tier the narration refers to, is priced at $20 per month.

Named in passing, and not quantified

The narration names Oracle, Microsoft and Nvidia as parties who would feel a demand miss, and Amazon, Netflix and Tesla as companies that looked financially unreasonable before their asset was understood. No figure is attached to any of them in the video, so none is stated on screen.

Not chased to a primary source