The Symmetry Problem
In the first half of 2025, OpenAI spent $5.02 billion running its models on Microsoft's Azure cloud infrastructure . Over the same period, the company was on track to generate roughly $13 billion in annual revenue —a respectable sum by any ordinary measure, except that OpenAI had just committed to pay Oracle $300 billion over five years for additional computing power [8,13], agreed to hand CoreWeave $11.9 billion across the same timeframe for data centres and services , and signed deals with chipmakers to secure 900,000 semiconductor wafers per month . The arithmetic produces a certain vertigo. By some reckonings, OpenAI requires $1.4 trillion worth of compute to realise its vision , a figure more than a hundred times its current annual revenue. The company's leadership believes that demand for ever-better iterations of its products will eventually pay off this staggering bill. Whether they are right is the question on which trillions of dollars now rest.