2025-09-10T18:02:45Z
OpenAI is raising billions at a $500 billion valuation, attracting intense investor interest.
OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar spoke at Goldman’s tech conference in San Francisco this week.
Here are the highlights of what she shared with the packed room of conferencegoers.
The Goldman Sachs tech conference is happening in San Francisco this week. The headliner was OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, who shared a ton of fascinating data on the AI startup’s booming business.
I attended the talk and compiled the highlights of her disclosures. The room was packed for her talk on Tuesday. Even the overflow room was full, with many analysts and investors sitting on the floor to watch. I’ve never seen so many loafers and crossed legs at the same time.
OpenAI is raising billions of dollars at a $500 billion valuation. Employees are also selling billions of dollars of stock. Investor interest in this company’s performance is intense. Here’s a taste of what Friar told Wall Street.
OpenAI is roughly split 70/30. 70% is the consumer business, and 30% enterprise.ChatGPT has roughly 700 million weekly average users on the consumer side of the business.About 4 million developers have built on the OpenAI platform.OpenAI has amassed roughly 5 million paid seats from ChatGPT business products.The company’s total revenue will be roughly $13 billion this year, up 4X from 2024.OpenAI spent roughly $2.6 billion on computing resources to help it generate that $13 billion in revenue. And a lot of that is likely recurring revenue. “That tells me to keep spending,” Friar told the crowd.The new model picker technology built into OpenAI’s GPT-5 model has led to more users tapping into the company’s reasoning capabilities. About 7% of GPT-5 is now reasoning workloads, versus about 2% before the latest models launched. Among enterprise users, reasoning workloads are now about 50% of the total.Inference costs are falling. GPT-4’s cost per token was about $33. Now, GPT-5 nano, a smaller, faster new offering, costs 9 cents per token. “Moore’s Law on steroids,” Friar called it.OpenAI has a 12% share of the search market now, up from roughly 6% at the beginning of 2025. The overall Search market is expanding as users send in more queries through conversational interfaces. Friar also said OpenAI thinks that its actual share of the search market may be undercounted.ChatGPT usage in the US versus the Rest of the World. “If you look at ChatGPT usage, I think even three months ago, I would have told you it was 15% US, 85% rest of the world. Today, it’s 10% US, 90% rest of the world. That tells you how fast the rest of the world is growing,” Friar said.In her finance team at OpenAI, many employees are using coding agents and other tools to help them get their job done more quickly. This is partly why OpenAI’s finance group is roughly 18% of the size of finance teams at companies of similar size, the CFO explained.
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