OpenAI Revenue Growth Jumps to 50% From 18% in Second Quarter

TLDR

• OpenAI’s Q3 revenue rose nearly 50% to $10 billion, and its CFO called it a “blockbuster quarter.”
• CFO Sarah Friar said OpenAI was “really stuck” on its Azure contract.
• Enterprise sales doubled, and revenue is now split 50/50 with consumer.
• Operating losses widened to $10.9 billion, but the adjusted margin improved to -109%.
• Anthropic’s IPO could take place Nov. 19 or Nov. 20.

OpenAI’s chief financial officer says a cloud contract limited how the company sold its products, even as it booked a record quarter. Sarah Friar said OpenAI was “really stuck” on its Azure deal with Microsoft.

Friar spoke on Tuesday about the third quarter, which she called a “blockbuster quarter.” OpenAI’s revenue rose nearly 50% from the prior quarter to $10 billion.

That gives the company an annual run rate of roughly $50 billion. In the second quarter, revenue growth was 18%, according to the Wall Street Journal. Annual run rate takes current sales and projects them over a full year.

What Drove the Quarter

Friar said the growth came from frontier research and the enterprise business. “Our enterprise business doubled quarter over quarter,” she said.

Revenue is now split 50/50 between enterprise and consumer customers. Friar named products such as Coding and Cyber as drivers of the enterprise gains.

OpenAI is also bringing virtual assistants to business clients. One is Dots, which is the company’s AI agent platform for enterprise customers.

Small and medium business sales also grew. They rose more in the third quarter than in any of the prior six quarters, Friar said.

Consumer sales rose 20% from the second quarter. Subscriptions topped 100 million users, and the company has 1.2 billion weekly active users.

Losses Grow, Margin Improves

Costs rose along with sales. Operating losses widened to $10.9 billion from $10.1 billion in the prior quarter, the Journal reported.

OpenAI told investors its adjusted operating margin improved to -109% from -150%, according to documents the Journal viewed. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment.

The margin measure compares losses with revenue. A move from -150% to -109% means losses took up less of each sales dollar, even though the dollar amount grew.

Friar said Anthropic’s enterprise success showed her that OpenAI needs distribution deals with third-party cloud providers. Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform.

“Anthropic showed me just the power of that model,” she said. She added that unlocking such deals could be “a very big tailwind in 2027.”

Anthropic’s revenue grew 1,206% to $33.2 billion in the first nine months of the year, which ended Sept. 30. It earned $16.3 billion in the first six months.

The company recorded sales of $4.6 billion in all of 2025. Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic does not have a consumer business.

Anthropic started its roadshow on Tuesday ahead of a planned initial public offering. Reuters reported the deal could value the company at about $1.4 trillion.

The share sale could take place Nov. 19 or Nov. 20. Investors have been closely watching AI company finances ahead of the listing.

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