OpenAI’s cash burn will be one of the big bubble questions of 2026

Stockmarket investors may have ended the year worried about the bubbly valuations of generative-AI firms.

But private markets still appeared to be living in a parallel universe. 

In 2025 the venture-capital (VC) industry poured $150bn into big AI startups such as OpenAI and Anthropic, far more than beneficiaries of the previous VC boom received in 2021. 

Such is its confidence that OpenAI, maker of ChatGPT, believes it can single-handedly tap private investors for as much as $100bn in 2026. That would be almost four times the amount raised by the biggest stockmarket listing ever.

If anything, though, even private investors are likely to start asking tough questions. OpenAI, Anthropic and other San Francisco-based AI startups may have demonstrated some of the fastest revenue growth of any companies in history. 

But they have also burned through cash at “Towering Inferno” rates, as they spend on the chips and cloud computing needed to train and run their models.

Read more | THE ECONOMIST

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