Two years ago, while speaking at Harvard, OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman confidently declared that advertising was “a last resort for us as a business model.” At the time, OpenAI was on track to lose something like $5 billion—and the company’s annual cash burn has only accelerated in the intervening years. By the end of 2025, analysts projected that it could lose double that amount, with total capex forecasted to rise above $100 billion per year through the end of the decade. Other analysts have been even more bearish: HSBC expects OpenAI to face a $207 billion funding gap by 2030; in December, an analyst at Deutsche Bank said that “no start-up in history has operated with expected losses on anything approaching this scale.”