Why 95% of enterprise GPUs sit idle while AI startups can't get compute
OpenAI's recent financial disclosures paint a bleak picture for the industry's economic model. The company missed internal revenue and user targets whilst projecting losses that could reach $14 billion in 2026.
According to The Wall Street Journal, CFO Sarah Friar has warned internally that ballooning compute costs may outpace incoming revenue, raising questions about the company's ability to fund future computing contracts.
These headlines are symptoms of a broader structural dysfunction across the sector, where companies inflate valuations to unprecedented levels and buy compute capacity far beyond what they can efficiently deploy. At an $852 billion valuation, OpenAI's revenue growth cannot keep pace with the IT infrastructure costs required to justify that figure.
OpenAI generates revenue primarily through API access fees and ChatGPT subscriptions. But every user query costs GPU time, meaning margins on inference are razor-thin or negative.
Revenue scales with subscribers, yet compute costs scale with usage intensity....
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