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OpenAI’s Deepening Losses Collide With $38 Billion AWS Deal and a Power Crunch

A Microsoft filing points to roughly $12 billion in quarterly losses, with leaders warning that electricity constraints now limit AI deployment more than chip supply.

Overview

  • Microsoft’s quarterly report, using equity‑method accounting on its roughly 27% stake, cut its net income by $3.1 billion and implies OpenAI lost about $11.5–12.1 billion in the quarter after Sept. 30.
  • OpenAI agreed to a seven‑year, $38 billion arrangement with Amazon Web Services for access to “hundreds of thousands” of Nvidia systems to run and scale its AI services.
  • The company is layering on multi‑year compute commitments reported at roughly $1 trillion overall, including arrangements cited at $300 billion with Oracle and $250 billion in capacity from Microsoft, with chip purchases staged to datacenter readiness.
  • Satya Nadella said the immediate bottleneck is electricity and ready datacenter “warm shells,” noting Microsoft already has chips in storage that cannot be connected; OpenAI has urged the U.S. to add about 100 GW of power capacity annually.
  • Despite roughly 800 million weekly users of ChatGPT, only about 5% pay, and CEO Sam Altman downplayed alarm about finances on a podcast while asserting revenue will rise and reiterating no near‑term IPO plans.