If the revenue keeps going up and losses keep going down, it may reach that inflection point in a few years. For that to happen, the cost of AI datacenter have to go down massively.
Amazon's worst year was 2000 when they lost around $1 billion on revenue around $2.8 billion, I would not say this is anywhere near "similar" in scale to what we're seeing with OpenAI. Amazon was losing 0.5x revenue, OpenAI 3x.
Not to mention that most of the OpenAI infrastructure spend has a very short life span. So it's not like Amazon we're they're figuring out how to build a nationwide logistic chain that has large potential upsides for a strong immediate cost.
> If the revenue keeps going up and losses keep going down
That would require better than "dogshit" unit economics [0]
0. https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/27/econopocalypse/#subprime-...
https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/annual/0...
"Ouch. It’s been a brutal year for many in the capital markets and certainly for Amazon.com shareholders. As of this writing, our shares are down more than 80% from when I wrote you last year. Nevertheless, by almost any measure, Amazon.com the company is in a stronger position now than at any time in its past.
"We served 20 million customers in 2000, up from 14 million in 1999.
"• Sales grew to $2.76 billion in 2000 from $1.64 billion in 1999.
"• Pro forma operating loss shrank to 6% of sales in Q4 2000, from 26% of sales in Q4 1999.
"• Pro forma operating loss in the U.S. shrank to 2% of sales in Q4 2000, from 24% of sales in Q4 1999."
Amazon had huge capital investments that got less painful as it scaled. Amazon also focuses on cash flow vs profit. Even early on it generated a lot of cash, it just reinvested that back into the business which meant it made a “loss” on paper.
OpenAI is very different. Their “capital” expense depreciation (model development) has a really ugly depreciation curve. It’s not like building a fulfillment network that you can use for decades. That’s not sustainable for much longer. They’re simply burning cash like there’s no tomorrow. Thats only being kept afloat by the AI bubble hype, which looks very close to bursting. Absent a quick change, this will get really ugly.
Unless one of these companies really produces a leapfrog product or model that can't be replicated within a short timeframe I don't see how this changes.
Most of OpenAI's users are freeloaders and if they turn off the free plan they're just going to divert those users to Google.
That's very different from the world where everyone immediately realized what a threat Chat-GPT was and instantly began pouring billions into competitor products; if that had happened with search+adtech in 1998, I think Google would have had no moat and search would've been a commoditized "function (query: String): String" service.
The exception is datacenter spend since that has a more severe and more real depreciation risk, but again, if the Coreweave of the world run into to hardship, it's the leading consolidators like OpenAI that usually clean up (monetizing their comparatively rich equity for the distressed players at firesale prices).
Alot of finances for non public company is funny numbers. It's based on numbers the company can point to but amount of asterisks in those numbers is mind-blowing.