Yesterday, it was reported that OpenAI’s ARR had dropped from $70 billion to $50 billion. Today, after reading Axios’s further explanation, it turns out the main reason is a difference in how revenue from cloud channels is accounted for.
Put simply, say a customer spends $100 using OpenAI models through Microsoft Azure. Microsoft takes a share as the channel partner.
For similar cloud-channel sales, Anthropic counts the full $100 paid by the customer as revenue, then records the channel share as an expense. OpenAI, on some channel sales, counts only the amount it actually receives as revenue.
The earlier $70 billion figure was an adjusted gross-revenue figure that investors used to compare OpenAI with Anthropic. The $50 billion figure is OpenAI’s own reported annualized revenue.
Of course, the specific breakdown of the $20 billion difference hasn’t been made public yet. The AI sector already took a hit yesterday; now we’ll see how the market digests this information.
Source: https://x.com/i/web/status/2108242517330436335
Put simply, say a customer spends $100 using OpenAI models through Microsoft Azure. Microsoft takes a share as the channel partner.
For similar cloud-channel sales, Anthropic counts the full $100 paid by the customer as revenue, then records the channel share as an expense. OpenAI, on some channel sales, counts only the amount it actually receives as revenue.
The earlier $70 billion figure was an adjusted gross-revenue figure that investors used to compare OpenAI with Anthropic. The $50 billion figure is OpenAI’s own reported annualized revenue.
Of course, the specific breakdown of the $20 billion difference hasn’t been made public yet. The AI sector already took a hit yesterday; now we’ll see how the market digests this information.
Source: https://x.com/i/web/status/2108242517330436335