OpenAI’s suspiciously clean balance sheet is about to get a hard look

OpenAI’s books show zero debt and just $46mn of quarterly capital spending. The catch, reported by The Information: around $665bn of commitments sitting just off the balance sheet, now heading for regulators’ desks.

On paper, OpenAI looks like a lean software business. The reality is far heavier.

As at 31 March, the ChatGPT maker had zero debt and less than $750mn of lease liabilities, according to The Information, which reviewed its financial statements. Its capital spending for the quarter came to just $46mn. That is less than Salesforce, a company that merely sells software.

For one of the most hardware-hungry businesses in tech, those are remarkable numbers.

The $665bn hiding off the books

The spending has not vanished. It has moved off the balance sheet.

OpenAI carries around $665bn of purchase commitments that do not show up as debt. Most of it is compute: long-term deals to rent the data centres and chips its models run on.

The company leans on Microsoft, Oracle, Amazon and joint ventures such as Stargate and Fluidstack for that capacity. The obligations are real and enormous. They simply do not appear where investors usually look.

A web of related parties

The structure raises a second question. Who sits on the other side of these deals?

About 72 per cent of OpenAI’s cost of revenue flows to related parties such as Microsoft. Microsoft is both a major backer of the company and one of its key suppliers.

That kind of concentration invites scrutiny over conflicts of interest. It is exactly the sort of arrangement that public-market regulators tend to probe.

Why it matters now

This is landing as OpenAI prepares to go public. It filed confidentially with the SEC on 8 June, a week after rival Anthropic, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley leading the deal.

The filing valued OpenAI at about $852bn. Analysts think a debut could push it past $1tn, perhaps this autumn. It follows SpaceX, which listed in June in the largest IPO on record.

The filing also hands financial regulators their first proper look at OpenAI’s accounting and its tangle of business relationships.

The valuation has to catch up

None of this would matter if the growth were already there. It is not.

OpenAI projects advertising revenue rising from $2.4bn this year to $102bn by 2030, when ads would be more than a third of its sales. Ad group WPP expects the entire AI search and chatbot ad market to be worth about $101bn in 2030. That figure already includes Google.

In short, OpenAI is forecasting that it can capture, on its own, a whole market the rest of the industry will be fighting over.

The bottom line

The cash, meanwhile, keeps pouring out. OpenAI spent about $34bn last year and burned through $3.7bn in the first three months of 2026 alone.

A clean balance sheet usually reassures investors. This one may do the opposite. Zero debt means little when $665bn of commitments sit just out of frame. Sceptics already warn that an OpenAI stumble could ripple across the whole AI supply chain.