Microsoft and Its OpenAI Losses
You may have seen articles in the mainstream business press lately questioning the strength of the AI investment boom . Are AI pioneers like OpenAI and Anthropic making any money? If they’re not, do we know how much money they’re losing? And are those losses showing up on the books of other tech companies, that financial analysts could get a better sense of the true picture here? As always, Calcbench is on the case. Let’s start with Microsoft ($MSFT), which has been investing in OpenAI for years, primarily via cloud computing resources Microsoft provides to the generative AI startup. In its quarterly report from Oct. 29 , Microsoft reported a $4.1 billion loss from those investments, up from a $688 million loss in the year-earlier period. See Figure 1, below. We were intrigued. If Microsoft is reporting a $4.1 billion loss on OpenAI today and a $688 million loss one year ago, what other losses has it disclosed related to OpenAI in the past? Alas, we can’t really tell. ...